


Finding Linda Tran

by ladykiki



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5098289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladykiki/pseuds/ladykiki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day (or more) in the Un-life of a Prophet of the Lord. At some point, those are actually supposed to get easier, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mako_lies (wingeddserpent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wingeddserpent/gifts).



> I'm slow, but I got it up here. I had so much fun writing this story, and I know I mention it in the notes I didn't remove from the original posting but your prompts were awesome, mako_lies.
> 
> (p.s. I found you.)

**Title:** Finding Linda Tran  
 **Creator:** ladykiki (the_ladykiki)  
 **Recipient:** mako_lies  
 **Rating:** PG-13  
 **Word Count:** 21, 844  
 **Warnings:** language, abuse of scene changes  
 **Author's Notes:** I had a lot of fun writing this story, and I really hope it makes more sense than it did to me when I was doing my final edit, because I kinda ran out of time to fix it. I’d like to thank the mods for running this gift exchange, and for the extension, and mako_lies for the prompt—seriously, so much fun writing this, when Kevin was a character I’d never considered writing before. I hope I managed to steer clear of your dislikes and hit at least some of your likes, and that you at least sort of enjoy this humble little (completely massive) offering. 

I’m sorry it’s so long?

 **Summary:** A day (or more) in the Un-life of a Prophet of the Lord. At some point, those are actually supposed to get easier, right?

***

Kevin had never given much thought to what would happen to him after he died. Prophets of the Lord went to Heaven, right? The other stuff—how he was going to die, when, with who—really didn’t bear thinking about. He’d done his freaking out. And even if most days he was really pretty sure he’d bite it sooner rather than later, well, everybody died. Right?

*

He hadn’t expected to open his eyes in the Bunker Library, his books and notes swept to the floor, a chair thrown across the room, the lamp in pieces. He hadn’t expected to see Castiel in the doorway, newly arrived and looking worried. And by the table. . . .

“Dean?”

*

When he’d been five, Kevin won his school spelling bee. He had been competing against fifth graders, and before it started, his mom told him: “Stand up straight. Speak clearly. You will not find the spellings on the ceiling, so do not be lollygagging. You are a Tran.” Finished with his tie, she tugged the front of his shirt straight, then smoothed her hands over his shoulders. Expression stern, she studied him critically, then smiled, so small his friends wouldn’t have known it was a smile. But he knew. “Knock ‘em dead, Kevin.”

They went out for ice cream after.

*

Kevin didn’t remember much from when he died. He remembered Dean asking him to trust him. He remembered paging through his notes, looking for something he might have missed. He remembered worrying about Dean, about the way he’d been acting. He remembered Sam coming into the library. He remembered Sam and then—

*

Standing in the veil was a little like living as a radio stuck between stations. Voices filled his ears like static, talking over and over each other. Sometimes one would slip through—

—“Where am I?”—

—“You can’t do this to me, Amelia!”—

—“What is this place?”—

—“You can’t just make me disappear, Brian!”—

—“Can anybody hear me? Please, is anybody there?”—

—and Kevin would try to talk to them, but it never mattered what he said, or how loudly. They never heard him. Or maybe they did and they just couldn’t find him. Like he couldn’t find them. 

*

Sam was screaming, voice tucked behind his teeth, head held back by Castiel, neck bared, a needle dug into the flesh under his ear. It looked painful.

“Why?” Castiel demanded. 

“We—we—we have to find Gadreel,” Sam said. His eyes were half-lidded, unfocused. But for a moment, Kevin felt certain they saw him.

“Sam,” he breathed, “what are you doing?”

“No. Why must the Winchesters run toward death?”

_Run. . . ._

Sam stood before him, shoulders back, tall and towering, expression grave. Then he lifted his hand and—

*

Burning.

Kevin sniffed the air, brow furrowing as the smell of smoke intensified. He had ten more minutes for his calculus problem sets, then he had to complete his physics homework before he could proofread his Literature essay, and his mom—

Cursing, Kevin slapped the pencil down on his notebook and scrambled to his feet. His mom had asked him to turn off the oven in fifteen minutes—his gaze darted to his monitor where a reminder flashed accusingly and the clock read 5:00—twenty minutes ago. His mom didn’t allow running in the house, but under the circumstances he believed she would make an exception. 

He could see the smoke twisting toward the ceiling by the time he slid to a stop in front of the stove. Quickly, he turned it off and the fan on, then hesitantly cracked the over door. 

Smoke billowed out, acrid and biting, but he didn’t see any orange flames in the moment before his eyes teared up under the assault, so that was a plus. Still, smoke was bad so he waved it away before hunting down pot holders. Pulling out the casserole felt a little he imagined handling a bomb would feel, only it wasn’t the casserole he was worried about going off. 

Somehow, he was going to have to explain the blackened mess to his mom.

*

He had to find his mom.

*

There was no light in the veil—not that Kevin could see, anyway. But it wasn’t dark, either. It was diffuse, like sunlight through fog, bright with no discernible source. He couldn’t see the ground beneath his feet or a ceiling over his head, no walls beyond the reach of his fingers. If it weren't for the screams, he wouldn’t have been sure he wasn’t alone. 

If it weren't for the voices he could sometimes hear talking despite the screams, he would have thought this was hell. 

“Hello?” he tried, grimacing when the word came out soft, muffled. Drawing a deeper breath, he tried again: “My name’s Kevin Tran. Can anyone hear me?”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” a voice said behind him, clear as if she stood right behind him. 

When he whirled, there was no one there. 

“Try to imagine you’re talking on a telephone. Go ahead. Picture it.”

He patted his pockets, looking for his cell phone, even as he kept trying to see the girl through the fog. Through what had to be fog. “Is that how you do it?”

She laughed. “No, I’m used to it. I’ve been here a long time.”

“Where is here?”

“Don’t you know?” she whispered in his ear. He jerked back instinctively, whirling to face her, but she wasn’t there. “This is where the souls go when they choose not to crossover. Nice, right?”

Like so much else dealing with the supernatural, “nice” wasn’t the word Kevin would use. “I didn’t get to choose,” he told her. At least, he didn’t think he did. 

“No one here did. Well.” He got the impression, if he could have seen her, she would have shrugged. “No one who died after the Gates closed, anyway. I got the impression from the woman trying to lead me into the Great Beyond that that kind of thing didn’t usually happen.”

Kevin stared. “You mean that didn’t just affect the Angels?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

How many people did that mean were stuck in the veil? “When the Gates closed. They closed off Heaven completely?”

“I guess,” the girl said. “Look, you’re the first idiot who showed up and didn’t immediately start screaming. I appreciate that. The crazies get a little hard to deal with. There’s no way to shut them up, yanno? But I just live here, so if you’re looking for the Meaning of Life or some shit like that, you’re gonna have to look somewhere else.”

“No! No, no, that’s not—” Angels and Demons, and a lightning bolt from the sky that left him so far from his ten year plan he’d have to dig to China through the middle of the earth to find it pretty much took care of that curiosity for him. “I really just want to find my mom.”

“Huh.” The girl’s voice drifted off to his left, sounding distant and then closer again. “Well, not to sound harsh, but. Did she die?”

_If you can’t find one Tran, find another._

Demons lied. How many times had Dean and Sam said so? And it wasn’t like Kevin didn’t have firsthand experience. But Crowley—the lying bastard—hadn’t just told him she was dead. He’d also said she was still alive. Which was the lie?

_Let me go, and I’ll give you back your mother._

“I-I don’t know,” he said. If he concentrated, he could see Crowley’s smug, evil face, blood smeared around his nose, his mouth, up in his hairline, cuts peppered across his left cheek, knuckles bloodied. He should have gone after the bastard’s head with the mallet—he was a demon, it wouldn’t have killed him. 

But it might have kept him from talking. 

How stupid did it make him to think the King of Hell might have been telling the truth about his mom? Part of it, anyway. He pursed his lips. “Is, uh—is there any way to find out if someone’s in Heaven?”

“We can find out who’s not,” the girl said, with the kind of easy, careless confidence Kevin—dammit—associated with Dean. “Probably, anyway. I’ll put some feelers out.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

How he knew she was leaving, he didn’t know, but the thought spiked anxiety through his non-existent body. He’d work on how he could feel anxious later. “Wait!”

She turned around to look at him. Or she felt like she did. “You got something else you want, Kevin Tran?”

“Her name’s Linda. Linda Tran.”

“Got it.”

“What, um.” He pushed a hand through his hair, inanely hoping it wasn’t sticking up funny, or plastered down, and that he wasn’t blushing. God, he didn’t even know if she could see him. It was stupid to still feel so awkward, suddenly, when he hadn’t been awkward at all just a few minutes ago. It wasn’t like he was asking her out on a date. He still had to clear his throat to continue. “What’s your name?”

The slow, wicked smile he thought he sensed had to be all in his head. Right?

“Alexis,” she said. “Don’t forget it.”

*

Someone was crying.

That wasn’t really new or earth-shattering news—multiple someones had been crying since he’d arrived. But this someone sounded close like Alexis had sounded close. More present. He looked around, trying to pin down what direction it was coming from. “Hello?”

Kevin didn’t hear an answer or see another person magically appear. Not that he’d really expected either. The crying also didn’t stop, and it sounded—young. Like, little kid young. Kevin didn’t know anything about little kids. 

And, okay, he’d been one once, had the embarrassing baby pictures his mom had saved to prove it and everything, but he hadn’t really been a normal kid. He’d been more interested in books and school than balls and trucks, and—well. What did you say to a dead kid, anyway? If he even _could_ talk to him. 

Now really wasn’t the best time for Dean to be in his head saying crap like, “This is what we do, kid. We help people.” Because, first: since when had _Dean Winchester_ become the voice of his conscience? And, second: Castiel had said he only had to be a Prophet until he died, then the Word became someone else’s problem.

Well, he was dead. He didn’t have to _do_ anything.

 _And what about human decency, Kevin?_ A voice that sounded suspiciously like his mom’s demanded. _Did that become someone else’s problem, too?_

“Mom?” He looked around again, saw nothing but foggy white. 

The crying continued. 

Kevin grimaced, but it didn’t seem like anyone else was going to do anything. “Suck it up, Kevin,” he told himself. “You wanted to be President.” Talking to a kid who’d died and was stuck between worlds had to be easier than running a nation. Right?

*

Walking in the veil was a little like walking on a treadmill: your legs moved, you did the work, but the scenery never changed. 

He wasn’t sure how he was going to talk to a kid he couldn’t see if he could even find him, but he figured he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. If he ever came to a bridge, because at this point finding anything seemed unlikely.

Which was, of course, when the white fog tinted—green, like someone had laid down a transparency. 

Suddenly, he had the impression of grass underfoot and leaves overhead. The kid sitting, knees drawn up to his chest, in front of the transparent tree trunk was all solid, though. Kevin was so surprised to actually see someone else he stopped walking. 

“Hello?”

The kid sniffed and scrubbed a hand from his nose, across his eye, and back through his hair. Gross.

“Are you—are you okay?”

Very wet, very dark brown eyes peered up at him. “I want my mommy.”

“Oh.” Kevin glanced around. The colors and definition faded out the further they moved from the kid at their epicenter, trailing away into featureless white in every direction. “Well—”

“She’s in there.” The kid pointed. When Kevin followed the little, crooked finger, he found a yellow house with blood red trim, a giant bush stretching to the roof at either corner. The driveway disappeared after only a couple of feet. To Kevin, the house looked empty, lifeless, and more than a little unreal.

Moving closer, he crouched in front of the boy. “Why don’t you go see her?” 

Tears welled in the dark eyes and the kid’s bottom lip trembled. 

_No_ , Kevin thought, slightly panicked. _No, not that_. “I mean—”

“M-mommy can’t-can’t s-sse-eee me,” the kid said. Teardrops slid down his cheeks. “I went s-swimming and the wa-water went up m-my nose and she c-ca-can’t s-see me.”

“Ok,” Kevin said quickly. “Ok. You’re ok. Um.” He looked around, seeking inspiration, but the yellow house was still the only thing visible besides them. He could work with that. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Ethan James Cartwright.”

“Ethan. My name’s Kevin. Do you think you could show me your room?”

The kid perked up, his knees coming down and his face brightening. “You wanna see my room?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok!”

Faster than Kevin would have thought possible, Ethan had pushed to his feet and grabbed Kevin’s hand, pulling him along with surprising strength. 

*

They passed through the door. Kevin was pretty sure he wasn’t ever going to get used to that, especially since it had looked solid the instant they stepped foot on the porch. Ethan either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared, just put his head down and kept going. 

The inside was dark, the lights off, the blinds partially closed. He thought he heard movement behind one of the walls. 

“Mommy’s baking cookies,” Ethan declared, and pulled them around a corner, down a hall, and into a room painted in primary colors. The sun shone brightly outside the window. It lit up the room when Ethan pulled the blinds open. Kevin could see another house on the other side of the fence.

“This is Bumblebee.” The kid turned around with a blocky, yellow and black action figure in his hand. “He’s funny. And he protects Sam no matter what because they’re friends.”

— _Sam lifted his hand_ —

“And this is my bed.” Kevin bounced on it on his knees, Bumblebee clutched to his chest. “Mommy and Daddy gave me Bumblebee sheets for my birthday. Aren’t they awesome?”

“Pretty awesome.”

“Do you want to play?”

“Ah—” _No_ , but Kevin couldn’t quite force the word out in the face of Ethan’s pleading puppy eyes. 

“I have Opt’mus Prime, too.”

He was so screwed.

*

“I want to go home,” Kevin told the white fog. 

It didn’t so much as turn beige. 

Closing his eyes, he tried picturing his mother’s face, instead. “I want to see my mother.” She’d be so vexed with him for getting himself dead. He was supposed to be smarter than that. 

Smart enough to figure out how to manifest as a ghost, too, but that, apparently, was asking too much because his surroundings stayed stubbornly white. For all he knew about Angels and Demons, and all he’d read on the Tablets, how spirits moved between worlds had never come up. 

He was seriously regretting that oversight now.

“Come on, Kevin, think!” he murmured. It couldn’t be that hard if Ethan James Cartwright could do it at six years old and not-long dead. He just had to figure out what he was missing. 

*

Alexis introduced him to John. John referred him to Ahmed. Ahmed thought he should talk to George.

George turned out to be Georgia. 

None of them knew anything about his mom. He wasn’t sure why she’d thought they would.

*

Kevin had met Channing in seventh grade, but not in class.

He’d known of her since third grade when his mom had moved them to Neighbor, Michigan and enrolled him East Neighbor Elementary. She’d been in his class. She’d been sitting in the second row, third desk back, when his mom walked him to the classroom, introduced him to the teacher, then lead him to the back of the room to help him put away his things. She’d been the only other Asian student in his class.

He’d been intensely aware of every eye on him, and his stomach had churned nauseatingly. 

“Relax,” his mom had ordered. “Kevin, you’re going to be fine. Study. Make friends.” He’d been relieved, under the humiliation when his mom leaned forward and lowered her voice to intone: “Maybe even a girlfriend.” But he hadn’t felt it until he’d been sitting down in the fifth row, second desk from the back and wishing he could disappear.

It had been nothing, and exactly, like he’d felt in the high school auditorium, trying out for the youth orchestra. 

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Channing had announced from beside him, violin clutched in white-knuckled fingers. He’d thought he’d feel better if he was doing this on violin. He’d only been playing cello for a year.

He’d nodded. 

“At least there aren’t too many this year.”

There’d been twelve. After the oldest kids had aged out, the orchestra had had twenty-two members. He’d read, before coming that orchestras ranged in size from fifteen members to more than a hundred, depending on the type of music being performed. The conductor had told them before they’d started, that no one who passed the competences would be cut—that they fit the music to the members, rather than the members to the music. But maybe he wasn’t good enough. 

“Do you think they grade on a curve?”

The idea had been absurd enough, that Kevin had looked at her askance. 

She’d grimaced. “I hate pass/fail. It’s like giving everybody a bow and arrow and telling them to hit the target, but then you don’t know where they’re going to put the target and you just have to hope you can shoot straight enough, far enough, and—”

“Channing,” he’d interrupted. “We know exactly what we have to do. The requirements are posted on their website.”

“Right,” she’d said. “We can do this.”

“Right.”

“So, I know the conventions are different now that we’re no longer in grade school. There’s the hormones to consider, the whole girl/boy dynamic and incursions into dating, and everything but—do you want to be friends?”

*

Alexis showed up—Kevin had no idea how many days later. 

“I think I found her,” she announced. She was wearing dark wash jeans with a pink Princess shirt, a crown picked out in shiny rhinestones across the front. Her hair was dark and curly, and it shifted over her shoulders when stretched out a hand to him. “Come on.”

Kevin was a little thrown by the fact he could actually see her. 

Alexis quirked her eyebrows. “Are you really going to leave me hanging?”

She waggled her outstretched hand, reminding him for one brief moment of the gymnastics chick from Bring It On—his familiarity with which, the guys were never going to know—doing sarcastic jazz hands. The absurdity of it reminded him he had something to be doing. He shook the thought away quickly, and hurried forward.

“Sorry. Where are we going?”

He couldn’t read the look on her face when she said: “Maybe don’t worry about that too much.”

“What?”

Then her fingers wrapped around his. 

They didn’t feel like fingers, more like—electricity, maybe, or energy. He didn’t have time to pull away or demand answers. He didn’t even have time to blink. Just one moment he was standing in the middle of white nothingness with Alexis and the next moment he was—

Standing in the middle of white nothingness with Alexis. She dropped his hand even as Kevin twisted around, trying to see something that would explain why he felt like he was in a different place.

“Are you ready?” Alexis demanded. 

“What did you do?”

Alexis smiled at him but didn’t answer. She faced a little past him and called, “Linda?”

“Hello?” a new voice said. It was high and sweet, and lightly accented, the pronunciation precise. And it wasn’t familiar at all. “I am Linda Tran.”

“Hi.” His voice trembled, and Kevin cleared his throat, throwing a glance at Alexis that the girl ignored. “I’m Kevin. Kevin Tran.”

“Hello?” Linda Tran repeated after a beat, her inflection unchanged. “I am Linda Tran.”

“Hi,” Kevin repeated, a little louder, but it didn’t get the woman’s attention, and after a moment he heard: “Hello? I am Linda Tran,” again. He couldn’t decide if it would be more or less creepy if he could actually see the woman. “Why can’t she hear us?” he asked Alexis. 

“Some of them can’t.” She shrugged. “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s dead, or maybe she does and her brain can’t accept it. I don’t know. There isn’t exactly anyone around to ask.”

He wondered if Dean would have any ideas, or Sam, or Castiel. “Why can’t I see her?” he asked, instead. “Why can I see you?”

“The Veil takes a little getting used to,” she answered, even as the other woman again said: “Hello? I am Linda Tran.” It made Kevin’s skin crawl. Or it would have, if he still had any. “I think part of it is how you perceive your reality, and part of it is how they perceive their reality. Like, you know this isn’t the real world, isn’t really a place in the conventional sense, so your brain doesn’t translate it the same way. Linda does. So because you’re not in the same place, you can’t see each other.”

Kevin thought about it. It made a certain amount of sense he wasn’t ready to attribute to anything presumably touched by God and Angels. But—“That doesn’t explain why I can see you.”

“Maybe I’m just meeting you where you are.” She grinned. 

“And it doesn’t explain Ethan.”

Alexis cocked her head, tilting it like a dog trying to hear its master’s voice better. “Who?”

“The—” Kevin opened his mouth before changing his mind. “That doesn’t matter. That woman—” _Hello? I am Linda Tran._ “—isn’t my mother.”

Slowly, Alexis nodded. A slight smile managed to turn her expression playful, almost sardonic. “Then we’ll keep looking.”

He blinked and she was gone. 

*

The veil was louder after Alexis left. He could still hear Linda— _Hello? I am_ —but now he could also hear a guy somewhere further to the right: “What do you mean, the tomatoes are gone? I ordered thirty pounds of tomatoes!”

And a woman: “No, please! Please, stop! I don’t— _Please_ , stop!”

And another: “Is this the bus to Oakland? I really need to get to Oakland.”

Kevin pressed his hands to his ears, squeezing harder as the voices seemed to multiply, speaking louder and louder, clearer and clearer, until he thought his brain would implode, until—

*

Sam had told him about ghosts once. They’d been sitting at some table, in some motel, searching through books for something, and Dean had been passed out on one of the beds.

“So ghosts are real, too?” Kevin had asked. 

“Ghosts are real,” Sam had said. “They, uh. Some of them, when they died, they couldn’t move on. Unfinished business, or whatever. Some of them choose not to. All of them, no matter why they stuck around—revenge or love or whatever—if they stick around long enough, they eventually go bad.”

*

Hesitantly, Kevin pulled his hands away from his ears and straightened, looking around, hal-expecting a monster to jump out of the fog and bite him. 

But the voices were gone. Or, not gone, but back to staticky-sounding background noise, the individual voices indiscernible. Slowly, Kevin relaxed, tension leeching out of his back and shoulders until he was just—

There. 

Kevin could really understand how this place could drive a spirit mad.

*

In the wake of that realization, he might have, maybe, been a little, teeny bit depressed. Maybe.

*

He felt Alexis before he saw her, which was really weird, especially when it felt kind of like she’d put a hand on his back, only without getting that close, or using her hand. 

Cool as it might have been three years ago, Kevin was really not prepared to learn ghosts could communicate via some form of telepathy.

“I’m sorry.” She grimaced once he turned to face her. “I should have warned you.”

“Warned me about what?”

“We’re all tied to a particular place,” Alexis explained. “Sometimes that place is where we died, or where we lived, or where we left something important. But it’s always one place, and moving away from that place—” She grimaced, expressively.

Kevin remembered the voices digging into his brain like shards of broken glass and grimaced, too. 

“In the real world, places are finite. You’re only ever in one place or another. But the Veil isn’t any particular place. In some ways, it’s all places, and no place. And I thought, since you don’t perceive any particular place, you might have more freedom of movement than the rest of us. I didn’t realize part it was also a function of your protection.”

He frowned. “Protection?”

“The Veil is a peaceful place, Kevin,” Alexis insisted. “Spirits come here to rest. Does this sound peaceful to you?” Her head cocked, listening to the voices around them, voices that Kevin could only vaguely hear, but that had never, as long as he’d been aware of them, sounded peaceful. Her gaze was fierce when it locked back on his. “They don’t belong here. None of them do.”

“Uh—” 

“Sorry,” she interrupted, before Kevin could figure out what to say. “I should g—”

“Wait!” 

Her lips pinched together, irritation wiping out the sorrow that had reminded him of Sam—of his pinched expression when he said, _if they stick around long enough, they eventually go bad_ —but she waited. He wanted to comfort her, or offer a solution, but the irritation was shades of Dean and he wasn’t sure how she’d take it. So he did the next best thing, and hoped he wasn’t making a mistake.

“Crowley,” he told her, continuing when she cocked her head curiously. “He’s the demon who took my mother. If anyone saw her, she was probably with him.”

Alexis’s lips formed the bastard’s name, then she nodded, her gaze already miles away before she moved an inch. “That should help.”

“I am sorry,” she added, with a dark-eyed glance, before she disappeared. 

*

 _Sorry_ , he decided, wasn’t quite the word for it. 

Back at the Bunker, he’d have been able to get on the laptop, try and track Crowley through omens or credit cards, or hack into the traffic cameras and see if he could get a hit that way. The search he’d run on his mom’s cell phone right after Crowley had told him she was dead had come up empty, but he could run that again. Something might have changed. 

And that was before he got to the Men of Letters’ library. He was sure he could’ve found a locator spell, one that could defeat whatever warding Crowley had put up to hide her. Or he could have found one to summon her spirit and at least known if she was somewhere in the veil. Sam could’ve helped him look, and Dean. 

But none of that was open to him here. Here, he couldn’t even figure out how to effectively communicate with the locals. 

Except Ethan.

He started walking the direction he thought he’d headed the first time he found the kid. He had no way to know if he was right, or if he was headed in the opposite direction, or even what he’d say when he found the kid, but any direction, right now, was better than standing still. So he walked. 

There was no physical marker, no change in the colors around him, but between one step and the next, the voices suddenly got louder, closer. He took another step.

The screams ratcheted higher. They pressed against his brain, an almost physical presence that tightened like a vice. Then they started pulling, stretching, and Kevin felt like he was being shredded, like claws had hooked into his flesh and bone and muscle and started pulling in different directions. He’d never felt anything like it and he thought he might have screamed.

Then he didn’t feel anything at all.

*

If he’d been asked, before he died, he’d have said passing out inside the veil was impossible. Syncope was a physical phenomenon, occurring when the brain failed to receive sufficient oxygen. So, no brain, plus no blood, equaled no loss of consciousness.

Maybe he’d write a paper about it, if he ever got his hands on some paper.

*

The knocking caught Kevin by surprise. He twisted, trying to find the source, and ended up looking at the ceiling. The relative ceiling, anyway, since the fog didn’t have walls, or gravity, and by the time he approached the source, it was a wall.

Literally.

Kevin pressed his hands against white that looked no different than what he’d already passed through, and frowned. It felt smooth, but less like the wall of a house and more like the top of his mother’s coffee table. 

The knock repeated—one, two-and-three-four, five, six—and Kevin could feel the vibrations under his hands. “Hello?”

Two knocks.

 _Not a wall_ , Kevin mused as he slid his hands down, then up, then over. _So, maybe a door?_ Obediently, his brain conjured an imagine of the door at the Bunker—not that that helped him see the one under his hands.

His fingers bumped over a ridge. On the other side, the texture was different, rougher. Brick, he thought, or concrete, but the substance didn’t really matter. He retreated back to the door, tracing just inside the ridge until his hand bumped a protrusion. He twisted and pulled, realizing at the last second that opening a door to a complete stranger probably wasn’t the smartest thing he had ever done.

He opened it, anyway. He was already dead. What was the worst that could happen?

The man standing on the other side was balding, six inches taller than Kevin, and smiling. He wore khaki slacks and a polo shirt, and strongly reminded the Prophet of the Baptist missionaries who’d gone door-to-door when he was six, trying to “save” him and his mother.

“You’re Kevin, right?” the man asked, hand thrust out to shake.

Kevin eyed the hand warily. “Yeah. Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m Paul,” the man said, still grinning. “We’re adjacent.” 

“What?”

“I’m your neighbor.” Paul raised his hand, wiggling his fingers slightly, and Kevin took it with the hope it would make the man go away. He couldn’t really remember what he’d been doing, but his head felt vague and distantly achy in a way he recognized, from when he’d last had a migraine. “Pleased to meet you.”

He’d always thought pain disappeared when you died. “Pleased to meet you,” he echoed, rubbing idly at his head. It took a moment to register that he could see the guy, and that that was odd. Maybe the migraine had fixed his perception issue?

Paul kept standing there, grinning.

“Was there something you wanted?” Kevin asked, finally.

“Oh!” The guy bounced up on his toes like he’d been goosed. “Yes. Yes, there was. See, I heard about your mom, how you’re looking for her, don’t know if she’s alive or dead. And I just wanted to know—ya’see, it’s a little hard for us to communicate around here. So I just wanted to know if there was anything I could pass along that might help.”

“Pass along,” Kevin repeated. 

“Only way to find out anything is to ask,” Paul informed him cheerfully. “So?”

“Uh.” Kevin really wished his brain didn’t feel like mush. Or that he’d paid more attention to ghosts before he’d become one of them. “My mom’s name is Linda Tran. She’s Asian, has short hair. Crowley’s about my height, maybe a couple inches taller, wears a suit, has a—British accent? I think. He has a lot of people who work for him.”

“Okey-dokey.” Paul clapped his hands. “I’ll just get out of your hair, then. God bless.”

Kevin poked his head out after the guy moved away, trying to get a look around—

And pulled back, fast, hand clamped to his head as his headache spiked. It eased off again, as fast as it had come, leaving only the memory behind.

That didn’t make it any easier to process the sheer press of people he’d glimpsed on the other side.

*

Kevin paced. He didn’t have the handy distraction of the Tablet, or any of the books from the Men of Letter’s library, or the more vexing distraction of Sam and Dean’s various missions and the demands thereof, so he paced. He paced off every dimension he could think of, until he was pretty sure he’d stepped on every square inch available to him.

He was pretty sure—say about eighty percent sure—that the dimensions matched the Bunker’s War Room (named enthusiastically by Dean), minus the staircase, the light-up map table, and the banks of computers.

He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.

He didn’t know what to do, period.

*

Leaving the faux Bunker wasn’t really an option, but that fact was probably why Paul stopped by every day. Or, what Kevin decided to call a day, anyway. He’d spent the better part of a year alone on a houseboat. He wasn’t prepared to consider the idea that some strange dead guy he’d never met before felt the need to check up on him multiple times a day when even his mother hadn’t (after he’d stopped answering her calls).

That didn’t make it less weird.

“How’re you doing, Kevin?” Paul asked once Kevin opened the door, hands folded neatly over his stomach, cheerful smile omnipresent.

“Ok.” Kevin’s fingers twitched against the door and he curled them into a fist. Purgatory might have been where the monsters went after they died, but he was convinced the veil was what Catholics meant when they spoke of it. Every myth had a kernel of truth, right? “How do you deal with all the free time?”

He’d found himself wishing for the Angel Tablet yesterday—or for a demon to pop in, or an angel, just for something to do. 

Paul laughed. “Time doesn’t mean the same here,” he said. He didn’t come in—couldn’t, possibly, Kevin would have to remember to find out—but he did settle comfortably in front of the open door, cross-legged and straight-backed, his expression fond.

Kevin didn’t really understand it, but the man hadn’t been put off by his hostility when he showed up a second time, with no news and no plans aside from conversing.

“We’re all going to Heaven,” he’d sniped.”Pretty sure you can lay off the missionary work now.”

Instead of taking offense, Paul had laughed. “I’m a youth counselor, not a missionary. But there’s more to missionary work than preaching salvation.” Then he’d laughed again. “Of course, once we enter the Lord’s service, we never really stop doing His work. Now, tell me: how are you doing?”

“But those of us who can,” Paul added now, eyebrows lifting meaningfully, “go home.”

“Go home,” he echoed.

“To the place that holds us.” He lifted his hands, laced his fingers together. “The place that binds our spirit, or our heart.” 

Unbidden, he imagined his mother, discarded in a ditch, sightless eyes fogged over in death, skin gaping where the demons sliced her open. He dug clenched fists into his legs. “You mean ghosts?” he ground out.

“Ghosts, restless spirits—both refer to souls that can’t move on to their final resting place. Just, whereas traditional spirits can’t let go of their past life, our past life can’t quite let go of us.”

*

Kevin didn’t have any reason to hold on to his past life. His mother was dead, Sam was the reason he was, and trusting Dean had gotten him screwed just like he’d predicted it would. The Bunker had been a prison. His only purpose had been to help fight creatures he didn’t want anything to do with. 

And, yeah, he knew Sam wasn’t actually the one who killed him. No matter what psychic abilities Sam Winchester had or did not have, no human had the ability to burn out another’s eyeballs, and considering his last memories, Kevin was ninety-nine percent sure that was what happened. Which meant an Angel, and—judging by Dean’s strange behavior—Sam hadn’t known about it, Dean had gotten in over his head because of it, and had been trying to fix it. 

None of that really helped, but—

The Bunker was at least a place, a familiar one, and Sam and Dean offered the possibility of information. Besides which, he was already dead. What was the worst that could happen?

*

Making the decision was the easy part, it turned out.

“What the hell?” Kevin demanded of Paul when he opened the door, flailing his arms a little because there wasn’t enough room to move. He was already in the Bunker. He had been back to the Bunker since he died. He’d seen Dean and Cas there, in the library. He’d seen Cas and Sam—well, he wasn’t sure what room that had been, but it had been in the Bunker. And now that he was trying to do it on purpose, he couldn’t do it? Seriously—“What the hell!”

Paul’s eyebrows quirked toward his hairline, lips carefully not turned into a smile. Kevin glared at him on principle. He could tell when an adult was laughing at him. An older adult. “Perhaps if you shared your trouble?”

“I can’t get back! I tried meditating—” He counted off the points on his fingers. “—I tried pushing. I tried pulling. I tried knocking myself out against the wall. I tried leaving this thrice cursed prison cell. And nothing— _nothing!_ —worked. What the hell!”

Kevin yanked at his hair, but the counselor caught his arm and tugged him square to the doorway, both arms caught in the other man’s grip. “Easy, Kevin,” he soothed. “Breathe.”

He forced air in through his teeth, then out.

“Now,” Paul said, giving Kevin’s wrists a shake, something his mother had done. Obediently, he unclenched his fists. “My opinion—and it is just my opinion, albeit a somewhat experienced one—is that you can’t go back, because you don’t want to go back.”

“Don’t want—”

“Ah!” Paul’s fingers tightened on his wrist in warning, and Kevin closed his mouth with a mutinous glare. “You think you want to. You have decided, in here—” He prodded Kevin’s head with a finger. “—that it’s what you need to do. But the Veil is not a place of reason, Kevin. It is a place of the heart, of emotion.” Pressing his hand over Kevin’s heart, he said, “It will never be enough to decide you want to go back, you have to feel it.”

Dropping his head, Kevin focused on breathing, on the warmth radiating from Paul’s hand. It shouldn’t have been warm, without a body, without a beating heart to circulate the blood, but it was. Slowly, his heartbeat slowed, and his breath evened out. Kevin nodded. 

Paul patted his chest before withdrawing. “It doesn’t need to be good emotions, Kevin. The dark emotions have power, too. But it’s a consuming power. If you go too far, you will never regain yourself.”

“Ven—are you talking about vengeful spirits?”

Paul tipped his head in agreement. “Don’t let your hate consume you.”

“I don’t hate anyone,” Kevin said. But he remembered Crowley, bound and helpless, and wasn’t sure.

*

He tried meditating again. He imagined the walls bleeding into existence, the map rising beneath him. He breathed deep, looking for the smell of dust and old paper, gun oil and aftershave.

*

Paul came and went.

*


	2. Chapter 2

He felt comfortable, safe, in the Bunker. The protections were built into the foundations of the building, older and stronger than the sigils they’d used on the houseboat, capable of hiding their existence as well as keeping Evil out. Within its walls, Crowley and his demons couldn’t touch him. 

Until the Winchesters invited him in.

Paul came and went.

He felt surprised when Dean said they were family, and affection. Dean never did anything halfway—always jumped in with both feet, whether that meant finding a way to destroy the Leviathan or save his brother—so maybe it shouldn’t have. The guy had tracked him down, done what he could to keep the monsters away, invited him into their home. 

Tried to kill his mother.

Paul came and went.

Sam was easy to like, easy to be around. He remembered, in ways Dean didn’t, or couldn’t, that Kevin was a teenager. He was always willing to pick up a book to help with the research, always willing to send Kevin to bed, or for food, or just to breathe, when it felt like too much. He let Kevin feel like it was okay to fail, like he’d be there to catch him if he did and wouldn’t think less of him.

Then he failed to close the Gates of Hell.

Paul came and went.

Kevin felt a little guilty about that one, being mad at Sam for not dying. He didn’t want Sam to die. He just hadn’t wanted to die, either.

Besides, he was pretty sure Sam choking at the one-yard line had more to do with Dean not being able to let him go than with Sam not be willing. 

Dean was easier to be mad at, anyway. He was the one who’d promised Kevin he was out. He was the one who promised, after they closed the Gates of Hell, it would be over. He was the one who let Kevin believe it. 

But how do you really, honestly, blame someone for not being able to give up their only family?

Paul came and went.

He never would have given up his mom if there had been any way to hold on to her, if he had known he wouldn’t be able to get her back.

Paul knocked. 

Kevin pulled the door open, leaned against it. He felt tired and raw, and he still hadn’t managed more than the briefest flicker of the bunker. For all he knew, he’d imagined those.

“You look terrible,” the counselor observed, face creased in concern.

Not un-like the way Sam had looked at him, on the houseboat, when he’d told the Winchesters he’d figured out how to close the Gates of Hell. Kevin huffed. “I’m fine.”

“It takes time, Kevin.”

“Everything takes time.” Irritably, he pushed away from the door, further into his _hell_. He’d been just a high school kid, before all this. He’d studied hard, and volunteered, and just wanted to go to a good college and become the first Asian-American President of the United States of America. What could he have possibly done to deserve this? To be stuck here, talking to only a select few, just like in the Bunker, just like on the houseboat, just like with Crowley and the Leviathan and the Angels. 

“We’ll find her, Kevin,” Paul said, gentle and certain and shades of Sam and Dean all over again.

Kevin glowered at him from the relative safety of the map-that-wasn’t-there. “It’s been weeks.”

“Communicating, even just within the Veil, is difficult.”

“Everything is difficult.” Turning, Kevin focused all the anger and frustration, all the mixed up emotions churning through him, and pressed his hands down flat on the top of the map. He saw nothing, but something was there to take his weight, to press back. 

After a long moment, when Paul hadn’t said anything, he turned back.

He didn’t much care for the expression on the counselor’s face, shrewd and assessing, like he’d seen something Kevin hadn’t wanted him to, knew something he didn’t. Kevin tensed against it. 

“Are you sure. . . .” His eyes narrowed, then he shook his head. “I want you to consider something, Kevin. Come here.” He dropped so he was crouched in the doorway, looking up. Trying to seem less threatening, Kevin knew, and that wasn’t exactly reassuring. 

Knowing he could close the door in the guy’s face helped a little. 

Moving slowly, Kevin did as Paul asked. He knew—thought he knew—was pretty sure—that the counselor didn’t want to hurt him. The thing was, he also knew Sam hadn’t wanted to hurt him, and Dean hadn’t wanted to hurt him. And, okay, yeah, he was already dead and there weren’t any demons or angels hanging around in the veil to screw with him. That he knew of. 

But that didn’t really make him feel any better at that exact moment. 

When Kevin was just outside arm’s reach, Paul patted the ground. “Sit down.”

Kevin did. 

“You’re a very strong young man, Kevin,” Paul said. “Very caring, loyal. And a lot of bad things have happened to you. I don’t know the details, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But I feel like you’re still trying fight, through them, or past them, and you haven’t quite figured out that what you really need to do is just let go.”

Kevin blinked at him as Paul lifted his hands. “Do you think you could do that? Let go?”

“No.” Kevin took a deep breath. “I can’t. Not until I find my mother. If she’s dead, it’s because of me.”

“If she’s dead,” Paul repeated, quirking an eyebrow. “You’re not sure?”

“I—Crowley told me she was.”

But Paul had that shrewd look again. “And did he also tell you she wasn’t?”

Kevin clenched his jaw and didn’t answer. Demons lied. How many times had Dean told him that?

But Paul nodded. “Maybe that’s it, then.”

“Maybe what’s it?”

“What you can’t let go.” He spread his hands. “Hope. Hope that she’s alive. Fear that she’s not. Either one will hurt, so you stay here.” His hands waved, took in the empty space of Kevin’s prison. “The one place you know is safe.”

“The place where I died,” Kevin reminded him. 

“The place where people love you.”

*

Kevin stared blindly at white walls. He remembered long days in asylum, giving himself nosebleeds and headaches to translate a hunk of rock he didn’t want anything to do with. He remembered listening to taunting words, working with a demon he wanted to rip limb from limb, because the angels had to go back to Heaven. He remembered safety being ripped out from under him, after Dean told him to trust him. He wanted to tell Paul he didn’t know what he was talking about. He wanted to tell him that the Winchesters had never cared about anyone but each other. 

He knew better, though. 

He took a deep breath. “Suppose you’re right,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Decide,” Paul said, like it was easy. “Do you believe she’s still alive?”

*

The thing was, Kevin didn’t always like Dean. He saw black and white where Kevin saw shades of gray; he made jokes about the macabre; he pushed and bullied and name-called, and most of the time Kevin could find the affection in it, but sometimes it grated. Sometimes Dean was rude and abrasive, and so goddamned focused on the bottom line that he forgot there were other actual people involved and Kevin wanted to take a bat to his head.

For all his flaws, though, the one thing Kevin had always admired was how completely he loved his family. If he’d ever had any doubt that Dean would do anything for his brother, the fiasco with closing the Gates of Hell had laid them to rest. He knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Dean would never have taken a demon’s word for it, not if their positions had been reversed, if Crowley had told Dean Sam was dead. 

*

Kevin tried meditating. Again.

*

Paul knocked on the door. When Kevin answered it, the counselor pulled him outside. He winced at the immediate increase in sound, squinting against sunlight that wasn’t there. If Paul noticed the reaction, he didn’t say anything, just:

“We may have found something. Listen.”

It was like listening to a badly tuned radio, the station fading in and out and overlaid by static. He frowned, trying to make out words, and heard: “Kev. . . .hat you?”

“We’re here, Jorge,” Paul said, before Kevin could get his brain together enough to answer. “Tell us what you know.”

“Didn’t . . . much. Was ma . . . eye rounds, you –ow? Saw these . . . guys. Thought . . . weird, you know? I mean, what . . . want with . . . Asian woman?”

“What did they do?” Paul prompted.

“Walkef her down . . . van. I think . . . knocked her out.”

“Do you remember anything else? Maybe something that struck you as weird?”

“. . . think about it. The . . . dude . . . two cell –ones. He was looking . . . one, calling . . . weird, you know?”

“Thank you, Jorge.” Paul pulled back, and Kevin only realized after the warmth and weight were gone that he’d been tucked into the older man’s side, pulled in tight with an arm over his shoulder. “I know it’s not much,” Paul said.

“No, it’s—” More than he’d had before. If he’d understood correctly, someone had seen Crowley with two phones, and his mom still alive. It was a reason beyond blind faith to hope. “It’s great. It sounds like that’s when Crowley grabbed her. He told me he killed her and took her phone, but if he had her phone and she was still alive. . . .”

_When have you ever known me to let anyone off easy?_

“He wouldn’t have had a reason to kill her.”

Paul clapped a hand on his shoulder. Kevin resolutely did not think that Crowley wouldn’t have needed a reason.

*

He shouldn’t have, maybe, but Kevin felt proud whenever he outlasted Sam on research. It didn’t happen too often, since the guys were away for days at a time while on a case, and Kevin didn’t count the day after—Dean usually slept until noon, those days, and the fact that Sam drug himself out of bed to help or just keep him company meant more than winning at a game Sam didn’t even know they were playing. And there wasn’t any point to it when the only real research was translating the Tablet. But when it was equal opportunity research and Sam hit the wall first?

Yeah. Suck on that, guys.

*

Paul thought the walls of his fake, invisible Bunker were psychosomatic representations of his brain’s desire to protect itself from further trauma, a projected defense mechanism that was not only keeping the other spirits from reaching him, but was also keeping him from breaking through the veil to the real world.

Kevin really did not want to hear that after a long day of getting absolutely nowhere. 

“Look.” Paul spread his hands, gesturing Kevin to wait. “I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m not saying that’s what it is. But you said the walls weren’t there before, and that you thought you’d pierced the veil twice before they showed up but haven’t been able to do it since. Right?”

He nodded. 

“So something changed, and the walls are a tangible representation of that. They’re also a common means of keeping something out, or something else in, and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had built walls to keep from getting hurt. Literally or metaphysically.”

Turning the words over in his head, Kevin felt tension easing out of his shoulders, which backed Paul out of his braced stance. He probably should have felt bad about putting the counselor on edge, but without the frustration, he just felt tired. He rubbed at his eyes. 

“Yeah, that makes sense.” He just didn’t know what to do about it. It wasn’t like he’d been actively involved in the wall building. “Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to get rid of them, then?”

Paul shrugged, but he met Kevin’s gaze squarely. “Face your fear.”

“Right.”

“Take heart, Kevin,” Paul offered with a small smile. “The Lord never gives us more than we can bear.” 

His lips twisted in something that might have been a smile. “Pretty sure that doesn’t count after you’re dead.”

*

The problem, because there always had to be a problem, was that Kevin didn’t know what fear he was supposed to be facing. That’d he’d get hurt again? That his mother was really dead and a shell of herself, caught in an endless, meaningless loop? That Sam and Dean wouldn’t be able to help? Wouldn’t want to? That he’d be stuck with the noise and the pain and the accumulated horror forever? 

*

Paul showed up, same as usual, grinning. “You up for a field trip, kid?”

Kevin followed him out to a patch of white that looked the same as every other patched, laid down beside him and stared up at more white. When Sam and Dean finally got around to fixing Heaven, he’d be just as happy to never see white again.

“Me and my wife used to do this,” Paul mused. “We’d go out in the back yard, or off to her Uncle’s farm and lie back in the grass, look up at the stars.”

“Do you see stars?”

“Naw, just clouds.”

Kevin glanced at him, then from his shit-eating grin to the white sky. “Clouds. Right.” Maybe, if he squinted and looked at it sideways.

“Did you ever do anything like this?”

“There wasn’t time after I found out I was a Prophet. I was too busy translating, trying to find something that would help us save the world; and when I wasn’t, it was too dangerous for me to be outside. Before that—” Before that, if he wasn’t at school, he was studying for school, or doing an extra-curricular, or volunteering. “—it wasn’t really important. I guess I always figured I’d have time later.”

“We all fall into that trap,” Paul said. “Sometimes, some of us are lucky enough to see it before it’s too late.” Kevin felt it, more than heard it, when Paul turned his head to look at him. “How’re you doing?”

The screams were still there. He could hear them rising higher, falling lower, the misery and anger and loss an almost tangible thing. It rang in his ears, created a low throb at the back of his head, like he’d tipped his chair back and smacked it against the wall. “I’m okay.”

“Good.”

Paul left a small eternity later. Kevin left to visit Ethan.

*

When Kevin found the kid, he was chasing a golden retriever toward the tree in his front yard, laughing. Then the dog rounded the tree, Ethan slipped, and Kevin slowed. Because deciding his best bet at figuring things out was to talk to the kid was a hell of a lot different than actually facing that kid and asking questions. 

Ethan climbed to his feet before Kevin could change his mind. An action that, in itself, wasn’t a problem, but when the dog rounded the tree and planted its feet in front of the kid, Ethan shrieked happily and turned tail. Right toward Kevin.

“Kevin!” the kid yelled, suddenly more intent on the Prophet than the dog. “You came back!”

And now on top of feeling awkward, Kevin felt like a heel. “Hey, buddy,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Good.” The kid kept walking until he was barely a foot away and dropped his head back between his shoulder blades to see Kevin’s face. Kevin buried his hands in his pockets to keep from pushing Ethan back a step. “Chance got out of the backyard, so he’s playing with me.” The dog barked. 

“Ah—” His gaze darted to the dog, surprised to see Chance sitting about four feet away, staring straight at him. “Wouldn’t it be better to play in the backyard?”

“But Chance likes the front yard best!”

“Right.”

“Do you wanna play with us?” 

Kevin had to fight the immediate and strong urge to back away. “I, uh—” have to go was on the tip of his tongue. He could always ask Paul or Alexis, or one of the others he’d interacted with. It didn’t have to be this kid—now. 

Just, looking into those large, liquid brown eyes, Kevin couldn’t quite get the words out. “I’d like to,” he said, then gave in and used his hands on Ethan’s shoulders to get some distance while he knelt. “But I have something really important I need to do first, and I need to ask you a few questions. Is that okay?”

Ethan’s head had drooped by the time Kevin finished, and he bit his bottom lip as he looked up through his bangs. “I guess.” 

“Ok,” Kevin said. “Ok.” And wished he had a better plan. “Do you, um. Do you know where you are?”

Chance whined and crept closer, close enough for Ethan to reach out and bury his fingers in the dog’s fur. He looked at his house. “Mommy says I’ve gone up to Heaven.”

“You will.” He squeezed the tiny shoulders reassuringly. The Gates of Hell weren’t closed, after all, so the only tickets not being collected led upstairs. He wet his lips. “Ethan, can you tell me how you see your mom and dad and—Chance?”

The good news, because Kevin was due some and he wasn’t above taking it where he could get it, was that the question wiped some of the sad longing from Ethan’s face. His brow crinkled in confusion. “But I’ve always seen them.”

“Even after you couldn’t breathe?”

Ethan nodded.

“But just at home?” he prodded.

Again, Ethan nodded. “Where else would I see them?”

Nowhere, Kevin had to admit, if Ethan was as young as he thought. He might not have started school yet, wouldn’t ever go away to college, might not have ever had a sleepover or gone to a theme park. He’d never get married. 

Kevin swallowed hard. “What about when your mom and dad are at work?”

“I play with Chance.” The kid smiled, gave his dog a hug. “We play lots, and when I get tired, I take a nap.”

“A nap?” Kevin hadn’t thought periods of unconsciousness were possible for spirits. They didn’t have a body to crave it or a brain that needed time to process stored information. Spirits had no physical parts to wear out.

“Uh-huh,” Ethan said. “It’s like floating on clouds, and I dream about happy things, like when I got Chance for my birthday, or when Daddy would read me a bedtime story. Or when Auntie Marie came to visit and took me out for ice cream. And then when I wake up, I go find Mommy.”

Tension raced through his—not body, his essence. The details were different, but the floating, the happy memories—those sounded familiar. “And you wake up in your house?” 

“Uh-huh,” he agreed happily. “In my bed.”

Because that was where he was used to waking up, Kevin wondered, or because that was where he went to sleep. It probably didn’t matter, but—as far as Kevin knew—he hadn’t slept since he died, in a bed or not.

Kevin smiled for the kid. “That’s good, Ethan. I just have one more question, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It may sound a little weird.” The kid stood up straighter, eyes open wider to show he was paying attention. “Okay. How do you fall asleep?”

Ethan frowned. “Mommy used to tell me stories to help me sleep, but she doesn’t anymore. So I lay down in my bed and close my eyes and tell a story and stay very, very still, like Mommy told me to, and think non-thoughts. Mommy said you can’t fall asleep while you’re thinking, but sometimes that’s hard, so she said I should put them in bubbles, when I can’t make them go away, and then blow them up to the ceiling. So I do, and I go to sleep.”

“Your mom’s a smart lady.” Kevin smiled. “Thank you, Ethan.”

“Do you wanna play now?”

*

Wanting to sleep didn’t make it any easier to go to sleep. He hadn’t felt the need to sleep since he got here, or maybe it was that he’d simply trained himself away from the impulse so long he couldn’t recognize the feeling anymore, and knowing he needed to sleep to move forward in his search for his mother wasn’t helping. 

Kevin remembered watching Dean slouch in an old armchair, prop his head up on a table, and just—stop, asleep in seconds; remembered Sam rolling his eyes before turning back to his research.

“How’d he do that?” he’d asked. 

“Soldier’s trick,” Sam’d said, without looking up.

Sam, he remembered, took longer, settling and resettling, breathing slow and measured until his brain shut off enough to let him drop off.

Kevin felt a little like he’d been left in an observation room and told not to think about pink elephants.

He huffed, pulled his hands up to pillow his face. Kept his eyes closed. Breathed.

His hip bones pressed uncomfortably against the floor, hard little points of pressure-pain. He ignored it several long seconds, determined to sleep on his stomach, like he had as long as he could remember, then gave up and flopped over onto his back. 

The floor hurt his elbows, so he folded his hands beneath his head. That made him feel exposed, though, so he brought them down and crossed his arms over his chest. That made him feel defensive and, oddly, trapped.

“You squirm worse than my daughter did back when she was four,” Paul told him. He sounded way too amused for a grown man who was watching another grown man sleep.

“Shut up.” Without opening his eyes, he eased his hands down until they were folded over his stomach. Cats presented their belly when threatened so they could turn a greater number of weapons against their attacker, using their hind feet as well as their front. 

Kevin thought he’d make a good cat, except they spent most of their time asleep.

His foot jiggled, and he pulled it up, planted it firmly on the floor, moved the other foot to match. “What if this doesn’t work?”

“It won’t so long as you’re talking,” Paul answered. 

“No. What if I fall asleep and nothing happens? What if I just wake up?” He had nothing but a five, maybe six-year old’s word that this was how he got back to the real world. Maybe it was different for everybody. Maybe his get back button was broken. 

Paul didn’t answer. 

“I mean, what if I never make it back? Or what if I dream I’m in the Bunker, talking to Sam and Dean, only I’m never really there? What if I wake up and think I did and nothing ever happens? What if I do make it, and they don’t want to go look for her? I mean the Angels fell, man, and I know they’re gonna try to fix it, but what if they can’t? We’d already hit dead end after dead end. What if they can’t fix it but they keep trying and because they keep trying they won’t go look for my mom?”

“Kevin,” Paul said, a shut up and listen to me that caught Kevin just as he was opening his mouth to go on. “It’s going to work. You’re going to go to sleep and get past this block and everything’s going to be fine. But if it didn’t, we’d keep looking. 

“And your mother would be fine,” he went on, “for as long as you needed her to be, because mothers are stronger than we give them credit for, most times. You’re going to find her, Kevin.”

“Sam and Dean will find her,” Kevin corrected, after a moment. After all, he was dead. 

“Sam and Dean will find her,” Paul agreed. 

They might not want to, though. He’d have to figure out a way to convince them. Maybe blackmail—emotional blackmail. He was pretty sure they owed him for letting him get killed.

“Go to sleep, Kevin.”

*

Channing volunteered at the homeless shelter with him, every Monday, Thursday, and Friday, for two years. She wore headbands to keep her hair out of her eyes. And every time, she lightly punched his left shoulder.

*

Love taps, he thought, and could just see Dean rolling his eyes. “All right, lover boy, go and get your love taps and let’s get outta here.”

*

Dean sat at the kitchen table, a fifth of whiskey and a glass waiting beside the laptop. Kevin supposed he should be glad the guy was using a glass. But the early hour, the fatigue in his face, the tired droop of his shoulders even when he was using his elbows to brace against the table leeched most of that good feeling away. This couldn’t be the real world, could it?

“Dean?” he asked. “What’s going on?” He tried to push the laptop closed, but his hand passed straight through it. Dean didn’t so much as blink. He just rubbed his eyes, then braced his head in his palm, stared blankly at the search running on the screen. “Where’s Sam?”

Dean reached for his glass and didn’t answer. Which—not totally a surprise, since Kevin apparently couldn’t interact with his surroundings, not even enough to make the laptop screen flicker.

He stepped back, looking around for—something; inspiration, maybe, but the kitchen looked the same as it always had: bare, spare, and utilitarian. It didn’t even have proper cabinets, which would have driven his mother crazy.

“Wait here,” he told Dean. The older man kept staring at the laptop. “Good,” Kevin murmured, even though it wasn’t, and headed off down the hall, ignoring the uneasy feeling in his gut that didn’t want him to leave Dean alone. It wasn’t like he could have done anything if Dean suddenly went postal. 

It wasn’t like he really thought Dean would go postal.

He was still relieved to run into Sam, though. “There you are. There’s something wrong with Dean, man.”

He wouldn’t have known it based on the way Sam reacted when he entered the kitchen. Sure, he asked if Dean slept, but he never broke stride, never hesitated, just continued going around the kitchen, collecting stuff for coffee, milk for cereal. He commented on the hunt Dean found the same way: with polite, if distant, curiosity. And, worse, Dean seemed to expect it, even returned it.

This time when Kevin looked around, it was for some sign that he’d entered a parallel dimension. 

“You sure you’re okay, Dean?” Sam asked, stopping Dean on his way out the door.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Dean demanded. His eyes were dark, but his expression was closed. Kevin glanced between them, hoping Sam would—he didn’t know what, but something. Anything that would dissipate the Twilight Zone feeling that these people he’d known for two years were strangers.

“’Cause—I don’t know,” Sam said, and if Kevin could see the lie, Dean definitely could. And maybe Sam knew that, because he straightened his shoulders and determinedly met Dean’s gaze. “This isn’t about what I said the other day, is it?”

Kevin couldn’t imagine anything either one of them could have said to cause this, but he still looked to Dean for the answer—saw the flash of hurt and anger before the older hunter pulled a mask of indifference over it, and said, “Oh, about that we’re not supposed to be brothers?” in the exact tone Chloe had used when he’d broken up with her freshman year, trying to sound angry when she was hurt and knew he knew it, and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. And Kevin didn’t know how to process that.

Sam and Dean, not brothers?

“What the hell?” Kevin demanded, but he wasn’t in the Bunker anymore. 

*

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin told Paul, agitated. He didn’t have a pen to tap, or a desk to tap it against, or any paper to write on or ball up and throw, so he pushed that energy into his feet and paced. “I mean, how do you just stop being brothers? Do you just wake up one morning and decide you didn’t have the same parents? Like blood is something you can change. Or growing up—suddenly, you did that alone? And it’s not like they’re normal brothers, either, who turned eighteen and moved to different states and maybe call at Christmas. They, like, live in each other’s pockets, like they’re twins or something. Only not really twins. Dean’s—what?—four years older?”

“So something changed.” Paul’s voice drew his gaze down. He knew Paul was sitting on the floor, some part of his brain had known, but he hadn’t been thinking about it. Sam and Dean were good for not thinking about a lot of things. So long as he was thinking about them, he wasn’t thinking about how he couldn’t help his mom. “Something big.”

The Gates of Hell had been big. They’d been going to close the Gates, then they didn’t, then—Dean had been acting weird. “The Angels fell,” he murmured, which was a big change, but not, he knew, the beginning. 

“Go on,” Paul encouraged.

“We were going to close the Gates of Hell,” he told him. “To do it, someone had to complete three trials, three tasks, and say a bit of Enochian. Sam was the one who—who opted in. Only we’re not talking physical gates you can walk up to and slam, we’re talking about a spell, about magic, so there’s a physical component to it, but also—”

“The working of the spell,” Paul finished. 

“Right. Naomi said if Sam finished the third trial, he would die. But I think—” And why hadn’t he gotten Dean to talk about this, beyond the little bit he’d sort of overheard from his conversations with Sam?—“I think he might have been going to die anyway, that he’d gone too far with the spell and there was no way to just stop. Not without consequences. Serious consequences.” He met Paul’s gaze, saw the counselor recognize the pit in his stomach. 

Because he’d been killed by an Angel, Kevin realized, an Angel who’d been possessing Sam, and he knew he’d known that, had already figured it out, but he hadn’t really processed it. He still didn’t know how to process with it.

“So Sam was dying,” Paul reminded him gently. “He was dying, and then he wasn’t. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Neither Winchester advocated possession, not even—maybe especially—the angelic kind, but the raised hand, the bright light, the burning—all of it fit. And angels could heal the dying. “Dean must’ve found an Angel and convinced Sam to say yes.”

But he couldn’t imagine how.

“Convinced him?” Paul prodded. “Or tricked him?”

I always trust you, Kevin had said, just before he’d died. And I always end up screwed.

“He might have tricked him,” Kevin admitted. “If he had to. If he couldn’t get Sam to say yes, or knew he wouldn’t.” Dean would do anything to save his brother.

“Kevin?” Paul prompted.

He took a deep breath, stopped moving. If Dean had tricked him, Sam wouldn’t have known there was an angel using his body. “The Angel killed me.”

“The one possessing Sam?”

Kevin nodded. 

Paul didn’t move. Kevin didn’t breathe, trying to hear him. He remembered Sam sitting behind him in that church, saying, “I’m thinking you were one of the pieces I should have picked up.” He remembered Dean’s anger that he hadn’t, that Kevin had needed help and Sam hadn’t been there.

Then Dean hadn’t been there to stop it when Kevin got killed. How much more would he hate himself than he’d tried to hate Sam?

But it had been Sam who’d said they couldn’t be brothers.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he told Paul. “They’re closer than anyone I’ve ever met. Even me and my mom.”

“The bigger the love,” Paul told him, “the bigger the pain when it’s betrayed.”

*

Alexis showed up shortly after Paul left. “Well, look at you,” she drawled with a grin, standing hipshot just outside the door. “Walking and talking and everything.”

Kevin frowned. “What do you want, Alexis?”

Her eyebrows jumped to her hairline, and Kevin fought the urge to wince. “Is that anyway to great the girl doing you a favor?”

“Sorry.”

“You look rough, kid.” She made a show of looking him over, head to toe, and it was only the real concern creasing her eyes and his mom’s manners that limited his response to an eye roll. 

He stepped back to let her in on instinct. “Rough night,” he said. “Do you wanna come in?”

Her eyes jumped back and forth, like she was looking at something over his shoulder. “No,” she said, her gaze still focused past him. He twisted around to see what she was looking at, but all he saw was featureless white. “No, I just wanted to let you know we found a spirit who thinks he might have seen your mom near Topeka. I don’t think she’s there, but we haven’t figured out yet if he kept heading northwest, or if he turned south. But we’re still looking.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“No.” Her mouth softened with regret. “He’s not taking the transition well. You wouldn’t get anything out of it.”

“But you did,” he challenged. 

She smiled, bright and cocky. “I’m just that good, hon.”

“Why is that?”

“Keep working on your little problem,” she ordered instead of answering, twirling her finger in a motion that either took in his crotch or the invisible Bunker. “I’ll keep looking for your mother.”

*

Kevin didn’t want to go to sleep.

*

See, Sam and Dean weren’t really into the big declarations of undying love, no guy was. But something sweet and artery-clogging would find its way to the kitchen after Dean had a hard day. And Sam would come back from a bathroom break or a food run to find ibuprofen and a glass of water by the laptop after he’d been squinting at the computer screen and rubbing his temples. They’d tell corny jokes to make each other laugh, or toss around in-jokes, or bring up something from their past with a word. 

It was the kind of relationship Kevin had always been stuck on the outside looking in at, wishing he had. 

*

Sitting around waiting had gotten old before Kevin bit it, and that was with Tablets from God and a library full of supernatural weirdness to wade through. Here, Kevin didn’t even have a paperclip. Or a clock, so he had no idea how much time had passed before he said _screw it_ and walked out the door.

He headed west, because every good western had the hero ride off into the sunset. Around his feet, the white swirled up to his knees, obscuring his feet except for brief glimpses when he moved. _Radiation fog_ , his mind supplied. He wondered if that meant it was night in the real world, or if the fog was a representation of his own inner turmoil. 

Frowning at the thought, he almost ran headlong into the first people he’d seen since he set out. “O-oh,” he started. “Hello.” There were four of them: a man taller than him, in tails and a top hat, with a beard; a blond man, also in tails, with a dark, pencil-thin moustache over his lip; and two women in brightly-colored satin evening dresses. None of them reacted. “Um, have you seen my mother? Linda Tran? She’s about this tall, has short hair. . . .”

No one twitched. Kevin shifted a little, trying to get into the Abe-lookalike’s sightline, then twisted around to see what they were staring at. He couldn’t see anything, but—maybe it looked a little darker, and—he squinted—was that a light?

It put him more in mind of a train than the warm, fuzzy kind TV was always saying to walk into. Kevin didn’t know what would happen if you got hit by a train in limbo, but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. “Right,” he told them. “Maybe later. I’m gonna just—”

They still didn’t react, and Kevin slipped past them with the unsettled feeling he’d just narrowly missed death. Which didn’t make any sense. 

“They’re actors,” someone said close to his ear, and Kevin reared back.

“What?”

The guy who grinned at him from about his chin was missing three teeth and would probably be Kevin’s height, if he stood up straight. “The manikin impersonators over there.” He jerked his head back the way Kevin had come. “They were doing Abe Lincoln in Illinois or some shit like that. Small time, off Broadway. Had a bit of bus trouble. Then, BAM! Hit by a train. Poor suckers.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. 

The guy reared back. “Why’re you sorry? You wasn’t driving that train, were you?”

“No.”

“Then, fuck ‘em. Not your problem.”

“Right,” Kevin agreed, figuring that was his safest option. “But maybe you could help me? I’m looking for my mother. Her name’s Linda Tran. She’s—”

The guy shook his head. “Ain’t seen no chinks.”

“I’m not Chinese,” he said. “And that’s rude.”

“So?” the guy demanded. “We’re all dead, ain’t we?”

“Right.” Kevin smiled tightly. “Well, thanks for your time.”

“Watch out for them manikins!” the guy called after him, then laughed. 

* 

Kevin was sitting cross-legged in the middle of his invisible Bunker when Paul pushed the door open, head braced in his hands and staring down at what he liked to imagine was the map, only focused on the United States and with every Crowley sighting from the last six months lit up. Of course, what he was actually looking at was plain-Jane white, but this was his death. He could pretend. 

“Did you get any sleep?” the counselor asked. 

“Yeah,” he croaked, surprised at how gravely his voice sounded. He supposed talking to more than two dozen people took its toll, even here. He swallowed, cleared his throat. “The Bunker was empty. I still can’t effect anything.”

“It takes time,” Paul soothed, folding down so he mirrored Kevin’s pose. 

“How long did it take you?”

“I’ve never tried.” Off Kevin’s surprised look, he smiled. “It’s just been me and my baby girl for a couple years, now,” he said. “And she’s long had her own house, her own life, a family. She’d stop by on weekends, catch up, but I wasn’t really a part of her life for months before I died. Swooping in, moving things around, letting her know I was there—that would’ve just upset her, made things more difficult for her. It would’ve made me feel better, maybe, but I’m already dead, and she needs to focus on her own family.”

Family, for as long Kevin could remember, had always been him and his mom. He couldn’t imagine growing up and moving away from her, starting a family that didn’t include her. Couldn’t imagine not wanting to know if she wasn’t gone. 

But Kevin’s life hadn’t exactly been normal, even before he woke up a Prophet. And he could understand not wanting to know the supernatural existed. 

He pulled up a wry smile for Paul. “So, what? Are you here to put me to bed?”

*

The Bunker was still empty. Kevin prowled the hallways without making a sound on the tile, without stirring any of the dust dragged in by careless feet. The lights burned steadily. 

Kevin stood in the Library and stared at where he had died, and tried to figure out if he felt more real, or less. 

*

As soon as Kevin woke up, he left the invisi-Bunker and started walking. 

*

Kevin had been excited when he’d beamed into his mother’s house. Before he’d learned that the agent with his mother was Leviathan. Before the Angels had died. Before his last chance at normal had gone up in smoke. 

He’d beamed in between the Angels and seen his mother, seen that she was all right, and she’d seen him, and she’d been happy and relieved, and Kevin had been so glad to be able to give her that, to be able to wipe the worry and the fear from her face.

He’d thought, just for that minute, that everything would be okay. He’d translate the Tablet, the Angels would keep him safe, and he’d be able to go on with life as usual—go to college, get married, become President. Everything had been going to be okay. Just for that minute. 

*

Paul met him at the door to the invisi-Bunker, leaning against the jamb before Kevin could slip past. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he accused genially. 

“No, I haven’t.” Stepping back, Kevin pulled the door further open and slipped out the other side. Paul came around as he went past, moving with him. Tension crawled up Kevin’s back, into his shoulders. He didn’t do confrontation well, never had. Before Crowley, he’d never really wanted to. He didn’t really want to now, he just—

“I had a teenage daughter,” the counselor informed him, still keeping pace. “I know what someone avoiding me looks like.”

And, suddenly, Kevin didn’t want to try to outrun this. He stopped and turned, and Paul stopped with him. “You’re not going to talk me out of this.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up expectantly. “Perhaps if I knew what this was. . . .?”

“You’re not going to talk me out of looking for my mother,” he snapped. “I’ve let other people dictate what I do for too long, and I’ve already wasted enough time sitting on my ass not looking for her when she might be out there, just waiting, or in pain, or maybe dying, wondering where I am. Well, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not.”

Kevin was breathing heavily when he finished, his hands curled into fists, and he tried to slow his breath even as he glared at Paul, daring him to contradict him, to say it was too dangerous, or his mom wouldn’t want him risking himself, or whatever other argument he might find to prove his point.

But the counselor just nodded slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not going to talk you out of this.” Kevin barely had time to register the words, to let the tension drain out of him, before Paul was clapping a hand on his shoulder. “But you’re not alone, either. I’ll be here when you get back. Good luck.”

He stepped back with a smile, sliding his hands into his back pockets. Kevin nodded. “Thanks,” he said, once he thought he could do it without embarrassing himself. “Your daughter had a pretty awesome dad.”

He started walking. 

He couldn’t help but smile when Paul yelled after him: “Remember, the Lord never gives us more than we can bear!”

*

Kevin sat in his chair in the Library. It wasn’t really his chair, because they operated on first-come-first-serve and accessibility as much as preference; and he wasn’t really sitting in it, but saying he was sitting in it stopped him from giving himself a headache trying to work out how he passed through the back without slipping through the seat. 

He flicked idly at the lamp, trying to turn it off, but the switch was apparently as insubstantial to his spirit as the seatback. Sam sat across from him, dutifully recording whatever information they’d learned on the hunt, first in hard-copy for the Men of Letters records, then into the database he’d created on the laptop. 

“You’re an idiot,” he told the bent head. “I die and you both feel guilty and—what?—you decide to take it out on each other?”

Sam didn’t stop or look up. The pen looped steadily. Kevin flicked the switch again.

With a sigh, he pushed up—through the chair and table, this time—and stalked toward the kitchen, which was where he was pretty sure he’d find Dean. After all, that was where he’d seen the open whiskey bottle.

“Have you tried talking to him?” he demanded, shoving at the laptop-- _his_ laptop, which in a fair world would have been it slammed closed as intended— to get Dean’s attention. It didn’t, of course—his hand went through it, and Dean raised the glass, sucking air through his teeth after he swallowed, never taking his eyes off the screen.

Once upon a time, Sam would have been sitting across from him and making bitchy faces and joking about porn.

Kevin made a face. “This is dumb, Dean. You and Sam are all you guys have. And, no offense, man, but this life really sucks on your own.”

Not that saying so made a difference. 

Irritated—at not being able to talk to them, not being able to move things, not finding anymore news about his mother (though Alexis swore they were getting close, and how would she know?)—Kevin slapped the table, hard.

And made contact.

Surprised, Kevin sat back, staring at the table like it might spontaneously get up and tap dance. But, more importantly, Dean was staring at it, too, sitting up straighter to see over the laptop, eyes tracking back and forth and then higher to try to find anything moving around the kitchen.

“Did you hear that?” he demanded, pushing forward. But instead of bracing himself against the tabletop, his hands slid through it. Dean’s gaze slipped over and past him without catching. “Dean?”

“Huh,” the hunter said, like something only mildly interesting and inexplicable had happened, then rubbed his temple and took a drink. His gaze went back to the computer screen.

“What? You’re not going to investigate? What if I was a—a—a demon, huh? What, then? Dean?”

But he wasn’t in the Bunker kitchen anymore, watching Dean drink his pain away, he was back in the veil, staring at endless white. He slammed his hand against his thigh because there was nothing else available. “Goddammit!”

“Language, Mr. Tran,” Paul chided, sounding so exactly like his ninth grade history teacher that Kevin sputtered.

“I was so close this time,” he told him. “I was able to hit the table. Dean heard it.”

Paul’s eyebrows went up, but all he said was, “And?”

“And I’m back here.” He could picture the dimensions of the invisi-Bunker if he tried, place facsimiles of walls if he wanted to, but—God—he didn’t want to. He wanted to be done.

“You should rest, Kevin. _Just rest_ ,” Paul insisted, when Kevin opened his mouth to argue. “Not sleep. Pushing through the Veil takes energy. You need to regain your strength.”

Kevin chewed off the automatic, sarcastic _I’ll sleep when I’m dead_ that flashed to mind—mostly because he _was_ dead, and he didn’t need to be handing Paul any leverage. Because he could already picture the man’s pointedly raised eyebrows, the dry “Exactly.” Instead, he said, “I’ll feel better resting when I’ve found my mother.”

“But you don’t know how long that will take, Kevin. It’s already been months. You have to face the fact that this search is going to be a marathon, not a sprint, and plan accordingly.”

“What?” Kevin blinked, stuck back at the beginning. _Months?_ It couldn’t have been months, could it? He knew time passed differently in Heaven and Hell, and he hadn’t exactly been able to track the passage of time but—“Months?”

Paul clasped his shoulders, mouth a sympathetic grimace. “Get some rest,” he repeated.

Kevin stared after him numbly, slowly sinking down to sit on the floor.

*


	3. Chapter 3

Kevin hadn’t been a big fan of walking when he was alive. Sure, it helped lower an individual’s carbon footprint, and walking regularly for a minimum duration of thirty consecutive minutes had definite health advantages, but driving was faster, and biking combined faster with the health benefits and reduced carbon footprint, which obviously made it the superior choice.

Which wasn’t to say he couldn’t do it, because he could. But walking through an endless sea of white, with or without bonus radiation fog, wouldn’t have been his first choice. And that was without retracing the same steps, day after day after day.

Maybe the same steps, he amended, tiredly. Kevin knew he left from the same point every day. The invisi-Bunker, whether or not it was solely a construct of his mind, had a definite physical analogue and occupied a finite location, to which his spirit was bound to return. But there were no signposts in the veil, no mile markers, no landmarks. He had no way to tell if each step he took equaled five feet or ten, or jumped miles altogether.

Except for the stretched feeling that grew the farther he travelled, he might have never known he moved at all.

There was a man crouched ahead, probably homeless when he’d been alive, staring into nothing with one hand extended, like he was holding a cup. The cup itself was missing. 

“Excuse me,” Kevin called as he approached. “Excuse me, sir? Hello?”

The man’s head came up, eyes searching wildly. They skittered, and only half-caught on Kevin, seemingly looking through him as much as at him. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

“My name’s Kevin Tran.” He held his hands up, palms out. “I’m looking for my mother. Linda Tran? Have you seen her?”

For a long moment, the man stared, head twisting a little as if listening, then he shook his head, soft then harder, and scuttled back. “No, I ain’t interested. Not buying, I’m not buying.”

“I’m not selling—” But the guy just kept shaking his head and muttering. “Thanks for your time,” Kevin told him, just in case, and kept walking. The reaction wasn’t wholly unexpected. It had happened a couple of times. Some of it, he figured, was the spirit still being caught in the patterns of his life. Some of it, though, was the distance. He thought.

Alexis had told him it was difficult to communicate in the veil. He hadn’t understood at the time, but the further he walked, the harder it was to see who he was talking to, like trying to watch a channel that didn’t come in clearly; their words faded in and out, eaten into by static, and he knew his voice sounded the same. But difficult wasn’t impossible.

“Hello?” The voice was high and female, scared, overlaid with static. “Is anyone there? Oh, God. What’s going on? Hello?” 

It wasn’t his mother, but Kevin wandered closer anyway. Alexis had helped him, when he’d first gotten here; it was only fair to pay it forward. “Hello?” he called back. “Miss, can you hear me? My name’s Kevin Tran. Hello?”

“Tran?” he thought he heard, only making the word out over the static because it was familiar. “I’m Candi,” was louder. “—happened?”

“What do you remember?”

Kevin didn’t hear anything for awhile. Then, “I escaped. Or, I—did. Do you know what—to the others?”

“Others?” Kevin asked.

“Jerome and Linda,” Candi said. Probably. The uncertainty didn’t stop his heart rate from picking up. His chest tightened, with fear or anticipation, like he was underwater, and it drew that stretched feeling taut. He tried to move closer, anway. “Did they make it out?”

“Out where? Where were you, Candi?”

“Witch—” he heard. Then he felt something give, and suddenly he was moving fast.

Kevin didn’t remember landing.

*

Paul was leaning over him when he opened his eyes. “Well,” the counselor said with faint humor, “I think you’re gonna live.”

Paul’s face receded, and Kevin blinked. It took a moment for his mushy brain to translate Paul’s translocation into a physical action, and another for him to realize he was lying flat on his back. “What happened?” he asked. He tried to sit up—

And promptly found himself back on his back, warm hands keeping him from floating away. His head throbbed, hard and pounding, but at least it didn’t feel like it was exploding, so that was a plus. Gingerly, he lifted his hand to his head to make sure his skull was still intact, and looked to Paul to answer his question. 

Paul looked to someone else. 

Alexis squatted next to him, frowning. “Looks like you tried to leave the reservation, chief,” she said. “I’m surprised you made it as far as you did.”

“On the plus side,” Paul added, “no Bunker.”

That made Kevin sit up. Fireworks went off in his head, the whole City of Neighbor Fourth of July Finale, but, once he was vertical, they settled down and Kevin could see. Paul and Alexis were definitely next to him. And so were a lot of other people.

“Uh—” Their expressions ranged from shocked to amused, concerned to scornful, and Kevin would have felt embarrassed if there’d been any room left in his skull. “Hi,” he said. At that, some of the people in the back moved away, and most of the people closer by lost interest. Which was when Kevin realized how many more people there were. 

Alexis seemed to read his expression. She smiled sadly. “It’s getting crowded.”

“No kidding.”

“This time,” Paul said, hand heavy on his shoulder. “You really need to rest.”

“Wait!” he said, halting Alexis as she climbed to her feet. “There was this girl. Candi. I think she knew my mother. She said she was in Wichita.” 

Alexis pursed her lips. “I’ll spread the word,” she said. “Just—wait here this time. Let the message come to you.”

She left, gone between one blink and the next. Paul, settled beside him, bumped shoulders. “Just between you and me? I think that girl’s a little weird.”

Kevin huffed, palmed his forehead. It felt a little better, he thought. Maybe. “No kidding.” The voices, rising and falling around him, the conversations too numerous to track, picked painfully at his skull. “Hey. What did she mean, about letting the message come to me?”

“Boy,” Paul scolded, “ain’t you ever played Telephone?”

*

Luella happily told him all about how her and her girlfriends played Telephone at every sleepover, sitting knee-to-knee in a circle. 

Carolyn slyly told him who she passed a message all around school that the homecoming king had slept with the school clown. It wasn’t supposed to get to beloved homecoming queen, Lisa Collins, but it did, anyway. 

Everett smugly told him how he used to leave messages for his friends taped under a bench. “Mom never could figure out where I got the hash,” he declared gleefully.

Janice thought passing messages was dumb, and told him so.

Kevin had revised his opinion of the veil: he was pretty sure he was actually in one of the upper levels of Hell.

*

“Are you Kevin Tran?”

Kevin looked up from the hand games he’d let a group of girls draw him into, figuring the games were better than the stories. The girl was watching him with uncomfortably pursed lips, her arms folded across her waist like they wanted to hold a pair of books. “Yes?” he said. 

Her nose scrunched. “I’m supposed to give you a message?” 

“Ok.” He scrambled to his feet. Despite the fact he was couple inches taller than her, she didn’t look up. Her eyes tracked to his, then her chin dipped. She spoke to his collarbone. 

“Candi said she’s in a forest in Wichita. Some guy was holding her and a couple others in some kind of cell. She said Linda was one of them, and that she thought the woman’s last name was Tran, but she wasn’t sure. They talked a lot, but she only heard her last name once. And she said Linda was alive when she escaped.”

“Do you know how long ago that was?”

The girl shrugged. 

“Can you ask?”

“Sure.” The girl turned to leave.

“Wait!” He reached for her instinctively, but stopped short of touching her—and was glad he had when her back tensed. “She said a forest in Wichita. Can you also ask her if she knows which forest? Or any landmarks? Anything that might help someone find her.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks,” he called, but the girl didn’t pause, moving away at a steady clip, slipping between the close pressed bodies easily. He had to remind himself it would take time to hear back.

That didn’t stop the giddy feeling bubbling in his gut. His mom was alive. Assuming the same thing that had happened to Candi hadn’t happened to her. But he had a location, and a time frame, and that was more than he’d had in a long time. This time, he wasn’t believing otherwise until he’d seen her body.

“Aren’t you gonna play?” Mary Beth called after him. 

“Raincheck,” he called back, already winding his way through the crowd. The invisi-Bunker wasn’t really a bunker anymore, his psyche or whatever no longer putting up actually walls, but its epicenter was still the place where he felt strongest. With the headache still throbbing dully at the base of his skull, and radiating faintly through the rest of his body, Kevin was going to take any advantage he could get.

He could finally send Sam and Dean after his mother, just as soon as he broke through the veil.

*

Sam and Dean didn’t hang out in the Library anymore. 

Sam took case studies back into his room. 

Dean drank in the kitchen or listened to music in his bedroom. 

The Winchesters, he’d decided, were idiots. But that didn’t get him any closer to his mother.

*

Kevin scrubbed wearily at his face. Getting to the real world was easy, now that he’d started consciously paying attention. He’d been able to track the transition and could manage it now without falling asleep, though he still closed his eyes. Watching all the people fade out around him was a little too weird, especially when his brain started wondering if they made up the walls in the Bunker, the colors. He hadn’t been able to slap the table—or anything else—again, though, no matter how many times he walked up to various flat surfaces, and it was irritating. How was he ever going to save his mother, since he’d gotten himself killed, if he couldn’t ever talk to the only people who could go find her?

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until the backs of his eyelids flashed with color, the better to avoid the panic attack he could feel lingering just out of sight, as well as the dozen or so people out of the dozens around him who were probably watching him, and leaned forward against his raised knees. Paul thought he was just wearing himself out, always trying to push through the veil, that he’d be able to manage it if he just rested awhile. Kevin felt pretty sure he was full of shit. 

“Your face is going to freeze that way,” a voice announced. 

“I don’t have a face,” Kevin countered.

“That’s going to make this conversation awkward, then,” said the voice, amused.

Which was when Kevin realized the guy talking to him was sitting down beside him. The sudden, close proximity felt like someone immersing half of him in a bucket of warm, sparkling water. It was disconcerting, his brain trying to process how the left side of him could go into a bucket without the right, and then freaking about electrocution. The dual impulse to get away and stay put to properly greet his guest jangled through his nerves. 

Not least because none of them were guests. None of them had homes, not here, no matter where they were tied.

“I’m Quentin,” the guy said. He had the darkest skin Kevin had ever seen, so dark it looked black, broad heavily muscled shoulders, and thighs as thick as Kevin’s head. He’d dropped one knee down, like he was going to sit Indian-style, and kept the other drawn up, bracing his arm. “Mr. Paul said I should come talk to you.”

“Mr. Paul?”

Quentin smiled, a flash of white-white teeth, bright and startling. “Old habit. I knew Mr. Paul back when I was a kid, young enough my momma would’a boxed my ears if she heard me not respecting my elders. Haven’t really seen him in a long time, though, so I still think of him as Mr. Paul.”

Kevin had a few teachers like that. “I’m Kevin,” he said, because his mother had taught him to be polite, too. 

“Nice to meet you,” Quentin said with another grin, offering his hand. Kevin shook it.

“You, too.” Kevin shifted, sitting up straighter and folding his feet closer. “So what did Paul want you to talk about?”

“Right to the point,” Quentin said. “I like that.” He leaned forward, so he was braced against his raised leg. “Mr. Paul said you were having some trouble breaking through the Veil. He thought I might could help you with that.”

“Can you?”

Quentin shrugged, with his face as well as his shoulders. “I don’t know, man. Everyone’s different, you know? My buddy, Steve—he’s a good guy, but he didn’t want to die and he’s angry about it. Maybe that’s the way you’re supposed to do it. You always hear stories about ghosts breaking stuff and shit like that. My grammy would’ve tutted and called him a restless spirit, if she could see him now; but he scares his ol’ girl, and that ain’t right, no matter what. 

“It’s something I ain’t gonna do, so I do it a different way. I think that’s why Mr. Paul wants me to talk to you.”

“You interact with people on the other side?”

“Just like I’m sitting here, talking to you,” he said. 

That didn’t magically make everything better. Because, bottom line? Quentin meditated.

*

“You’re not focusing,” Quentin said.

Kevin clenched his hands where they rested on his knees and didn’t move. “I know how to meditate. I’ve done it before.”

“Bully for you. I’m not talking about meditation. I’m talking about _focus_. Your body, mind, and soul, all dedicated to one goal.” Quentin shifted. Kevin couldn’t tell if he was moving forward or back without opening his eyes, but he was pretty sure he’d hit him if he could see him and that wouldn’t be fair to Quentin. “You’re focusing with your head, man. And I get it, that’s what you’re used to. When you were studying, or taking a test, your mind was what you needed in control.

“But this—breaking through the Veil ain’t something you can think into being. You’ve got to feel it.”

“I do feel it,” Kevin snapped, opening his eyes to glare at the man crouched before him on the balls of his feet. “My mom’s in the hands of a demon. The only way I can save her is to tell my friends on the other side where to find her.”

Quentin nodded. His hands laced together, forefingers extended, he pointed at Kevin. “That’s still something you know in your head,” he said, then raised his hands when Kevin opened his mouth. “Hold up, hold up! I know! You’re focused. And I believe you, man. You want this, more than anything.

“But you’re a cerebral kind of guy. Always thinking.” Quentin tapped two fingers against his temple, then frowned, studying Kevin like he was looking for the best angle to wrap him up and drive through him—and he was definitely blaming Dean for the sports metaphors. 

“I’m guessing you never played sports,” Quentin said, finally. “But did you ever do a performing art? Chorus? Band?”

“I played cello.”

“And performed?”

“With the orchestra.”

“Ok, good.” Scrubbing his hands over his head, Quentin dropped his weight onto his knees, putting the other man closer than Kevin was really comfortable with. “Did you ever, while playing, just let go? You’d already practiced the technique, the timing, everything, and now you were in front of the crowd, and you had to just let everything go, had to trust you had all of that down, and focus on the performance? Did you ever do anything like that?”

 _No_ , he thought. But the question still conjured bright lights, the feel of warm, smooth wood against his palm, the bite of taut metal strings against his fingers. The rapid tap-tap-tap of a baton against the conductor’s podium. 

Of their own volition, the fingers of his right hand curled over imaginary frets, muscles tensed to bear a weight he hadn’t even thought about in years. When he drew his next breath, he could smell just a hint of resin, feel the warmth of anticipation in his chest. 

*

There was a charge in the air when he opened his eyes in the Bunker, a little like it felt just before a thunderstorm, and Kevin glanced at his hands, half-expecting to see electricity arc from the tips.

He stood in the halfway, not in the War Room or the Library, which was also different. And when he tried to move, it felt a little like walking through water—like there was something other than air around him, hindering his steps and making him work harder to get anywhere. 

He didn’t see Dean, or Sam, but that wasn’t really unusual. The Brothers Winchester rarely wandered the halls these days. The emptiness, the strangeness, did make him wonder if he was dreaming, though. It hadn’t happened before (that he knew of), and he had no evidence that it could, but—well, stranger things had happened. 

“Dean?” he called. “Sam?”

Suddenly, Kevin found himself outside Dean’s door, without any memory of taking the intervening steps. He glanced over his shoulder, but the hallway looked normal—minus the hint of shimmer that had been there since he arrived. Holding his hands up still didn’t reveal any lightning or other strangeness, so he tried to push open Dean’s door.

It felt like touching a live-wire. His muscles—or energy or whatever—went rigid and he couldn’t pull away. Pressure built against his palm, then pain, sharp and deep, like someone was pressing a poker into the base of his hand and down his arm. It throbbed bone-deep, and Kevin grit his teeth against feeling, his breath locked in his chest, squeezed his eyes shut and pulled.

He didn’t remember moving, but when he managed to open his eyes, his back was against the wall and Dean had thrown the door open. He didn’t look at Kevin. He looked left, then right, eyes narrowed and body coiled, ready. The hunter had his Colt 1911 in hand, and Kevin didn’t know what kind of rounds Dean had loaded, but he doubted the other man intended to use it. Unless he planned to shoot at empty air, because apparently whatever was different, it wasn’t Kevin’s visibility.

Damn, but touching that door had hurt.

Suddenly, Dean took off down the hallway, chasing God only knew what. An electrical surge? Or maybe he was going for the weapons. Kevin didn’t know and didn’t really care because the next thing he knew, the world was fading out, losing color and definition, and there was a sound like blood rushing in his ears, through his head, and the smell of ozone clogged his nostrils.

The next time he was able to blink his eyes open in a place, it was to see Sam moving away. _Toward the Library_ , his fuzzy brain decided. He took a step to follow and tripped over a chair—in the Library—and lost some time watching it spin.

 _Focus, Kevin_. And Kevin couldn’t have said if the voice was his or Quentin’s or even Paul’s. He felt wiped, and he’d only come in contact with a door and a chair. The air was still viscous enough to choke on, like some kind of gel. 

Sam’s gaze went straight to the chair when he charged out of the hallway.

“Sam,” he gasped, lurching toward the hunter. Sam’s gaze came up in reaction—or maybe not, as it drifted past him; Kevin was getting really tired of people staring through him—and then swept the room, presumably for a weapon, because he moved away from the Prophet to grab an old sword from the Men of Letters’ display. 

A sword was starting to sound like a good idea to Kevin. He could bash oblivious hunters over the head with it. 

Stalking after Sam as best he could with the air working against him, the charge in it turning his right palm into a struck tuning rod, Kevin made it as far as the steps. And then something hit him that felt like rain and electricity, like being held together and taken apart, like being lifted up and tossed by the ocean, all at the same time. 

*

Quentin stared at him. “Well? Did you do it?”

For a moment, Kevin didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t even know where he was. It felt like all he could do just to breathe, to pull air in and push it back out. Even if he didn’t need to breathe—he was dead, right? Ghosts in the veil didn’t breathe—each rush of cool, crackle-free air cleared his head that little bit more. 

He pressed his left hand against his chest, and idly flexed his right, working the ache out of the bone. Which reminded him—why had the Men of Letters put wards on the bedroom doors, when ghosts weren’t supposed to be able to enter the Bunker in the first place?

“Kevin.” Quentin’s head pushed into his line-of-sight. “Hey, man, are you with me?”

“Yeah.” He was pretty sure. He could see him, anyway, and white beyond him, and other people—spirits—around them. 

“What happened?”

“I tripped over a chair. Dean shot me.”

Quentin’s eyebrows shot up and he rocked back on his heels, and Kevin actually registered what he just said. Dean had shot him. With rock salt. Which meant Dean had seen him. And unless his brain was even fuzzier than he thought, Sam had seen him, too, just before Dean blew him away. Bastard. 

“What the hell kind of friends do you have, man?” Quentin demanded. 

Kevin couldn’t help but laugh. 

*

There was no question of Kevin going back. Just, the half-dozen or so people he’d interacted with since his psyche dismissed the invisi-Bunker didn’t seem to agree.

“I have to go back,” he repeated. 

“No. No way,” Quentin growled. He had a firm grip on Kevin’s bicep as he stalked through the nothing around them toward—Kevin had no idea. But it wasn’t doing anything to help the achy, stretched feeling that had taken up residence in his—self—being—since he got back from the Land of the Living. “You aren’t going back.”

“I have to.” If he could get his free arm up and around to pry at Quentin’s grip, he might have a chance in Hell of enforcing it, too. But Quentin was strong, and fast, and Kevin was having a hard enough time staying on his feet without trying to multi-task. “I have to tell the guys about my mom.”

“They shot you, man!”

“I’m already dead,” he countered, thinking that might have some sort of impact on his tutor. After all, it wasn’t like they could kill him again, and, honestly, the shot was more frustrating than painful. If it hadn’t been for his encounter with that stupid door, he probably wouldn’t feel so wrung out. 

Then Mary Beth’s voice shrilled: “You were shot?” And suddenly there was a lot more than just Quentin’s interference vying for his attention.

“Are you okay?”

“Who shot you?” 

“Oh my God! Did it hurt?”

“You’re not planning on going back, are you?” 

“Who has guns?” 

“Are they psychopaths?”

“Can I have one?” 

“What do you need a gun for?”

Kevin wanted to bang his head against the nearest non-existent wall—which probably actually meant returning to the Bunker, so, bonus. 

Quentin ignored them all, grimly marching Kevin forward. “You’re still not going back so they can shoot you again,” Quentin declared.

“They didn’t know it was me,” he argued.

“Because that makes it better,” the other man snarked. 

“Why didn’t they know it was you?” Mary Beth interjected, earning a glare from Quentin that _she_ blithely ignored. Kevin appreciated that, if not the question. 

“I never fully manifested.” And, okay, he didn’t actually know that, but it sounded good. And since he had no idea what a partial manifestation looked like from the other side and, Kevin realized, the Winchesters wouldn’t have been expecting him in the first place, since the Bunker was warded against spirits and they would have burned his bones, after, it was probably also accurate. “They couldn’t tell it was me.”

“Then why were they shooting at all?”

“They shouldn’t’ve been,” Quentin snapped.

Kevin probably got more pleasure out of ignoring him than was healthy. “They hunt ghosts,” he told Mary Beth. “The ones that get stuck on the other side and start hurting people.”

“Like that’s an excuse.”

“Is that possible?” Mary Beth asked, eyes wide. 

“Only for those who can’t let go,” Paul answered, appearing out of nowhere. Quentin, thank God, finally stopped.

“Oh,” she said.

“Is there a problem?”

“Tell him—” Quentin rattled Kevin forward, agitated. “—that he’s not going back.”

Paul looked from him to Quentin and back again, apparently waiting on an explanation, so Kevin shrugged as best he could with his arm still being held hostage. “I surprised them. Dean got me with rock salt.”

“Shot him,” Quentin corrected.

“It’s harmless,” Kevin countered. “And I’m going back.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Thank you, Quentin,” Paul said before either Quentin or Kevin could continue, giving the erstwhile tutor a smile. “Why don’t I take it from here?”

Kevin rubbed his arm once the other man released it, and didn’t fight it when Paul looped an arm over his shoulder, started leading him back the way they’d come. If he concentrated, he could make out some of the others talking about guns and rock salt and _isn’t it awful? People just shooting you._

Paul kept the pace slow and steady. “Rock salt, hm?”

“Repels spirits.”

“You look terrible,” the counselor said, and Kevin didn’t doubt it. He felt pretty terrible. “It’ll be harder to break through when you’re already tired.”

“I know.” But Kevin appreciated the fact that Paul hadn’t said he couldn’t do it. “I’ll rest after.”

*

Kevin blinked weighted eyes open in the Bunker Library. That first moment, the world looked weird—distorted, like he was looking at it underwater—and the air pressed thick and fast around him, like it could squeeze him out, and the ground seemed to fall out beneath him, twisting, and it felt like he would twist apart with it. 

For that first moment, he was afraid he’d be resting now, whether he wanted to or not. 

He held on anyway, clenched his jaw and hands and abs and the muscles in his thighs just in case any of that would help, and rode out the disorientation until, finally, the room seemed settled and normal, and it felt like he could breathe. Moving felt like slogging through quick sand, though, with weights tied around his ankles. That sucked. 

As if the rest of everything didn’t. 

He was exhausted by the time he found Sam in the kitchen, packing shotgun shells with salt. Judging by the number of filled shells, he’d been at it—long enough, Kevin decided tiredly, too wiped to figure out how long it took Sam to finish a shell.

“Where’s Dean?” he asked, dragging himself to one of the stools opposite the younger Winchester—the one closest to the coffee maker—and plopping down. He didn’t feel the wood impact his tailbone, which didn’t bode well for making his presence known, but he didn’t sink through it, either. Kevin was willing to take his victories where he could get them right now. 

Sam noticing him apparently wasn’t one of them. The taller man’s eyes darted for the door on occasion, and swept the room at intervals, but his attention stayed on the shotgun shells he was packing, motions practiced and smooth and repetitive, and Kevin zoned out watching Sam’s hands. 

He had no idea when Sam finished making shells and started organizing them into—pouches? Racks?—but he zoned back into him saying, “—warded and sigiled from top to bottom. There’s no way something came in from the outside.”

“Ok.” Dean’s voice came from almost directly behind him, and Kevin pushed back to his feet. Obviously, sitting when he was this tired was dangerous. No one had ever told him what would happen if Dean sat on him, but he really didn’t want to find out, either. “So whoever’s haunting us died here.”

“Do you really have to hash this out?” he demanded, to no effect. “You don’t exactly have a lot of options here.”

“A dead Men of Letters?” Sam proposed. Kevin couldn’t see Dean’s face—the older hunter had his back to him—but he could see Sam’s, and Sam didn’t believe that any more than Kevin did. What he really didn’t understand was why Dean might, why Sam thought he had to feed his older brother an obviously wrong answer.

Except for how that was what they did, when hunting, tossing out possibilities and crossing them out.

The frustration—of being so close, of not being able to communicate—itched under his skin, pushing Kevin back into motion. He paced a tight circuit, from the end of the table to the wall, careful not the brush the cinderblock in case there were wards embedded in them like there had been in the door, only listening with half an ear as Dean elucidated why their ghost couldn’t be a Men of Letters knock-off.

“Occam’s razor, Dean,” he murmured, then had to put his hand out when the room wavered. He would’ve seriously considered something unwise for a cup of coffee. 

“Well, it must’ve been a more recent death,” Sam murmured.

 _Finally_. The coffee maker dinged under Kevin’s hand, drawing his attention. It wasn’t on. It certainly hadn’t drawn the attention of the Winchesters, because even through the distraction, he could hear Dean’s stubborn, adamant, “No.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I burned his body myself. Okay? It’s not him.”

 _It is me_ , Kevin corrected, watching the coffee maker, and grinned when the tri-tones sounded again. It wasn’t ideal but, considering he hadn’t expected to have to convince them the ghost was him, Kevin would take what he could get.

“Sam, I’m telling you,” Dean said, “This ghost? It’s not Kevin.”

_Yes, it is, Dean, and you’re wasting time arguing against something you already know is true, so suck it up. Idiot._

Both hunters were looking at him—well, at the coffee maker—when he ran out of steam and let go, and Kevin breathed a sigh of relief, even as he slumped back against the table. Their expressions too hard to read past the blur in his eyes, but Kevin still saw Dean step back, and Sam edge closer, so he wasn’t really surprised when it was Sam who ventured a tentative, “Kevin?”

He brought his fist down on the coffee cup, because anything else was too much effort. He wasn’t really surprised the action proved too much, he just wished he could’ve seen their expressions when the damn thing shattered.

*

He thought he floated for awhile after that, there and not there and somewhere. He blinked and saw his mom, smiling at him as she pushed his hair back, blinked again and saw Paul, heard voices murmuring around him. 

He thought he saw Sam and Dean in the Bunker Library, watching him intently, once, but he couldn’t remember what he said or what they said, and he thought it might have been a dream, if it was possible to dream. Maybe it had been a memory.

He thought he saw Sam a couple times, alone, in the Bunker kitchen. He’d look up when Kevin dropped in, but he always blinked before the hunter could say anything and then he was gone.

*

Alexis was waiting for him when gravity reasserted itself, crouched at his side. He blinked at her, slow and hazy-feeling but clear-headed, then pushed up to sitting—or tried to. His muscles (not-muscles) felt weak and shivery, like when he’d had the flu in sixth grade, and he was pretty sure reality twisted to get him upright, instead. Alexis didn’t move.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. 

“I learned from the best,” he answered, and huffed a breathless laugh when he realized that was something else he could have, arguably, picked up from Dean.

“There are some things you really shouldn’t learn from the Winchesters, Kevin.”

 _Wait, what?_ That had almost sounded as if she knew them. “What?”

Alexis pushed to her feet. “Penelope came by. Told me to tell you that Candi said she was in Wichita Forest, near a wooden structure, a trellis, probably a couple miles in. Your friends’ll have more luck getting information from her on the other side.”

“Thanks.” Kevin pushed carefully to his feet, part of him expecting the world to flip again, but he made it to his feet without issue. “How do you know the Winchesters?”

Her head tilted slightly, eyes not quite focused. It made him feel twitchy, which was weird, and he shuffled his feet to dissipate it. Suddenly, Alexis smiled. “The first time is always the hardest,” she said. “Good luck.”

“What—” But she was gone. Kevin blinked, catching sight of Paul. He gestured at the space Alexis had occupied. “Is that what it looks like when someone goes back?”

Paul’s brow furrowed. “It’s like stepping through a door, Kevin. It’s not exactly a gradual process.”

“Except when it is.”

The counselor shrugged. “Alexis has been here longer than most. She’s had time to practice.”

“Right.” But that didn’t shake the feeling that there was something weird about her. He’d just have to look into it later, after his mom was safe from Crowley. “How long was I out?”

“Not long enough,” Paul said. “You still look like crap.”

“Well, don’t worry. I won’t touch any warded doors this time.”

*

He was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to touch anything at all. Sam still sat at the kitchen table (which was a relief), but saying his name didn’t get his attention, the air didn’t have that strange electric-crackle feeling, and the coffee maker remained inert and silent when he tried to make it ding. Or, failing that, throw it across the room. Frustrated, Kevin paced.

“Anything?” Dean asked.

“No,” Kevin snapped. 

“Eh, couple of dings, a little EMF activity,” Sam said, and surprise quickly gave way to aggravation. Apparently, he did a better job breaking through the veil when he was unconscious than he did—as whatever he was now.

 _“You’ve got to feel it,”_ Quentin had said. _Feel. Don’t think_ , his mind obediently quoted. _Trust your instincts._

Trouble was he wasn’t a Jedi and his instincts were telling him he was running out of time.

“Ok, Kevin,” he said, ignoring the weirdly awkward conversation behind him. “Focus.” He closed his eyes, took a deep, wholly unnecessary breath, let it out slowly. Tried to figure out how music was supposed to help him manifest.

The only thing he could come up with was Ms. Elise.

Which reminded him of sixth grade, and changing music teachers. Ms. Simmons had taught primarily elementary grade children, focusing on the basics, and Kevin had wanted to be challenged, had set his sights on joining the youth orchestra the following year, when he became eligible. His new teacher, Ms. Elise, at his first lesson, had told him to pick the piece he knew the best and play it. Kevin, knowing it was a test, had counted diligently and placed his fingers as correctly as he knew how.

Then Ms. Elise had asked him to turn the music over and play it again. That hadn’t been what he’d expected, and his mind had gone blank. But she’d been smiling, small and warm, when he’d finally fumbled to a halt.

“Do you know why I asked you to do that, Kevin?” she’d asked. He’d shaken his head. “I wanted to know if you could put yourself into the music.”

“What?”

“The thing that separates the truly great musicians from the good ones isn’t technique. It’s the ability to rise above it, to sink themselves into the music, and to share how the music makes them feel. Do you understand?”

He’d shaken his head. 

“Close your eyes,” she’d instructed. “Breathe. Forget about the chair and the music stand. Forget about me. Forget the letter of the music. Push everything out until you can hear the music playing in your head, until you can feel it flow through you. When you can feel it, when it feels happy, or sad, or agitated, or calm, I want you to put fingers to the strings, and play.”

He hadn’t been able to, but panic had pushed him to try in the last few minutes of the lesson.

Quentin and Ms. Elise, he thought, would have understood each other. Too bad he didn’t.

“All right,” Sam said, drawing Kevin’s attention. “You’re up.” He stood. Dean met his gaze only briefly, then Sam left, the pair passing each other with the kind of stiff body language and averted eyes Kevin had last seen from Sally McPhearson’s parents, when they were going through a divorce. It was weird. Kevin frowned. 

“You know you’re not actually my parents, right?” 

Dean sat without that sad, guilty look wavering an inch, pulling the coffee maker around so he could see the blank display screen. 

“You don’t get to blame each other for my death and then split up because of it.” 

“Kevin,” Dean said, like he could pull Kevin to him just by saying it. 

Kevin stopped. He didn’t feel anything, but he crossed his arms over his chest and said, “What?” just in case he could.

“Kevin,” Dean called again, stronger, no more aware that Kevin was already there. The Prophet rolled his eyes, pushed back into motion. 

“It doesn’t work that way, Dean.” Whatever Dean had to say to him, he could say it while Kevin figured out how to be able to answer him back. 

“All right, I can’t do this,” he said. “Coffee buzzing, bump-in-the-night crap. I got serious things to say to you, ‘kay? And I’m not going to say them to this.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth, looking vulnerable and sad, and Kevin stopped. 

“Dean. I don’t want to hear this, man.”

“Kevin, I’m sorry.”

Stalking up to the hunter didn’t do anything. 

“You did not choose this life.”

“Dean, stop.” 

“You busted your ass.”

Pushing him didn’t do anything. 

“You lost everything, everyone you loved.”

Tension coiled between Kevin’s shoulders, tightening them with the memory of Crowley’s voice saying _so we killed her_. 

“And your reward—”

He stalked away, but that just let Dean fling “getting killed” at his back. He frowned.

“On my watch,” the hunter said. “If I. . . .”

Kevin whirled. “If you want to be sorry, Dean, be sorry for not listening to me.”

“That was on me.”

“Be sorry for not telling me there was a strange Angel in the Bunker.”

“It was my fault.”

“Be sorry you didn’t tell me you didn’t think you could trust him anymore. That you didn’t give me the information I needed to protect myself.”

“. . . and there’s nothing I can do to make that right.”

Kevin wanted to shake him. 

“I am so sorry.”

The thing was: Kevin didn’t care. Not that he had died, and not that Dean had let it happen. Bad things happened, and sometimes they happened to good people. And sometimes bad things happened to good people that Dean knew and cared about, and he always thought it was his fault, and he was always sorry.

Sorry wasn’t going to help him find his mom.

“This isn’t happening,” Kevin told the air, letting the certainty settle in his gut. “This is not happening. I did not spend months trying to break through the Veil just to listen to Dean Winchester have a self-pity session. Because I didn’t hear enough of those when I was alive. I—”

“Kevin,” Dean said, sounding different, and Kevin looked up. Both Winchesters (when had Sam come back?) were in the kitchen, side-by-side and facing him, looking at him.

“You can see me?”

They stepped closer and Kevin glanced at his hands, trying to figure out if they looked different. There was a buzz, low in his gut, kind of like a generator, weird and a little uncomfortable, and it sputtered even as he tried to focus on it. 

“Woah, take it easy, Kevin,” Sam said. “You might not hold this form for too long, ok? It’s takes awhile.”

He didn’t have awhile. This had already taken too long. “Then we should talk fast,” he said. 

*

It hadn’t been fast, telling the Winchesters about Heaven and Candi and his mom still being alive. It hadn’t been fast to convince them Crowley could have been lying and they needed to check it out. It hadn’t been fast to get their agreement, to know they’d take his information and go bring back his mother. But it was fast enough.

The waiting took much longer.

Then his mom was standing in front of him, whole and strong, just like he’d always known her to be, happy and sad and there, and glad to see him. And it was worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> p.s. I'm kinda really bad at tagging, so if there's a tag you think is needed, let me know. I hope you enjoyed reading.


End file.
